Fort Collins, Colorado - Room 5007

Finally we left Nebraska behind and pulled into Fort Collins, Colorado, which we liked a lot on our first motorhome trip around the country.  It's known as a prime retirement community and has one of the great downtowns in America.

We came to Colorado because 1) we might possibly want to move there, and 2) the leaves should be changing colors during the month we plan to stay.  But we learned that Colorado has been experiencing a drought this year, and droughts stress the trees and cause the color changes to begin earlier than usual, so we might be a little late.

Fort Collins is at an elevation of 5000 feet.  About an hour away is Estes Park, Colorado, which lies at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park and sits at 7500 feet.  Estes Park is a very pretty town, and we drove up there because we heard that its fall colors were currently vibrant.  Unfortunately, along the way we didn't see much fall color, mostly because the great majority of the trees are evergreens, not the deciduous kind whose leaves change color.

Estes Park really is an attractive community, with lots of restaurants and shops along its streets.  But it's become a popular tourist area, so that traffic is pretty bad.  And the leaves in town were disappointing - just starting to turn.

Estes Park is the site of the huge Stanley Hotel, which was the inspiration for The Shining.  The story is that Stephen King and his wife stayed there one night in 1974 just before it was to close for the season, and they were the only guests and therefore had the run of the place, just as Jack Nicholson's family did in the movie.

That movie wasn't filmed there, but a later The Shining miniseries was.

After a good lunch in town we drove up into the Rocky Mountain State Park.  We saw a herd of elk - a harem of about fifteen females and a male who stayed a short distance away.  Impressive.  At the suggestion of a ranger we drove up to a lake where some color was supposed to be dramatic, but it was a bust - just a few trees with yellow leaves surrounded by all those evergreens.

Back at our RV park the next day, I walked over to the campground office, which was some distance away, and experienced some significant shortness of breath.  In fact the same thing had happened to me recently in Estes Park and even in the flatlands of Ogallala, Nebraska.  And the preceding couple of weeks I had noticed some discomfort in my left lateral chest whenever I took a deep breath.  Putting those symptoms together, I decided to seek professional help.  Nancy looked up "urgent care near me", found one with all five-star ratings, and we drove there.  When we walked in, it was a tiny place, with large signs promoting Botox injections, and a small sign on a door reading "Urgent care".  We retreated and took away from that experience that when reading reviews of restaurants, hotels, or urgent care clinics, it's good to read the written reviews, not just go by the number of stars.

A further internet search took us to Associates in Family Medicine Walk-in Clinic nearby.  Dr. Murphy examined me, had a chest X-ray taken, and thought I had pleurisy, probably viral in origin.  I mentioned that I was concerned about the possibility of a pulmonary embolus (which can give pleuritic pain and shortness of breath), but he thought it unlikely.  Still, he drew blood for a D-dimer test, which he said he disliked because it had so many false positives, and said he'd let me know the results.  (D-dimer is a test for blood clots in the lungs or legs.)

The next afternoon, as Nancy and I were driving around, a nurse at the clinic called me and said that my D-dimer test was remarkably elevated and that I should go immediately - immediately - to a nearby hospital's emergency room to be checked out.  She asked our location and directed us to UCHealth Poudre Valley Hospital.

That ER was nowhere near as busy as Dominican Hospital's.  I was taken back immediately and seen by a physician who examined me and because of the mildness of my symptoms also seemed to think it unlikely that I actually had suffered a pulmonary embolus, but ordered a CT scan of my chest with and without contrast.  About an hour after that was done, the doc returned and said, "Well, you have multiple small clots in both lungs."  Holy moley!

And so I got a heparin shot and was taken upstairs to room 5007 on the cardiac unit.

I stayed overnight for observation, was treated kindly and professionally, and was discharged the next day on the Xarelto that you see constantly advertised on television, with instructions to avoid prolonged sitting, and to follow up with my hometown physician.  It had been a close call.  I was happy with my treatment in the hospital, this episode was great blog material, but it was such a remarkable relief to get back to Nancy, Sophia, and Tammy Faye in our little portable home.

Southwestern Nebraska

Two more Nebraska stops on the way to Colorado - Kearney and Ogallala.  Kearney is an interesting place.  For a small city (population 34,000) in the middle of nowhere, it boasts quite a few significant things to see.  There are seven or eight museums, a branch of the University of Nebraska, and more restaurants than we expected.

The number one attraction in Kearney is the Great Platte River Road Archway, a massive structure sitting across Interstate 80.  The archway contains a museum dedicated to the western expansion of America by settlers who passed through the area between about 1840 and 1860.

Fort Kearney, an army post way back then, was an important stop on what is known as the Emigrant Trail, through which passed wagon trains going west to Oregon, California (gold rush), and Utah (Mormons).  Fort Kearney was also a pony express station.  Here is a tableau of Mormon emigrants pulling handcarts on their way to Salt Lake City.

Kearney also has an impressive Classic Car Collection museum.  Not only does it display over 200 automobiles but it has realistic recreations of a 1950's gas station, a drive-in theater, and other scenes from that era.  The automobiles shown are pretty much from the beginning to the end of the last century.  All are beautifully restored, with detailed page descriptions of each.

Included were examples of several cars I owned during my misspent youth - a 1963 Corvette Stingray (the one that had a divided rear window), an Austin-Healy convertible, and a Daimler SP250 sports car of around 1965.  Ah, memories.

The downtown of Kearney showed that the city fathers had worked hard to make it a happening community.  Multiple streets had been paved with bricks, which looked very nice but made for an uncomfortable ride.  Still, there was too much of a strip mall look to the city overall for it to entice a couple of travelers from California to think about settling down there.

The drive on I-80 to our next campground stop in Ogallala, Nebraska was an especially boring one, pool-table flat, with cornfields and grasslands as far as we could see.  Ogallala was a cowboy town during the early 19th century.  It was a stop on the Union-Pacific Railroad, and cattle drives ended there.  Ogallala was one of the towns featured in the great TV series Lonesome Dove.

In spite of its interesting history, Ogallala itself is a dreary little town, but there are quite a few points of interest.  There's a little museum of petrified wood sculptures by two local brothers, now 90 years old, and other works by local artists.  And there's a recreation of an old Western street.  (Unfortunately, most of the businesses were closed, as we're headed into their offseason.)

A highlight was our visit to Ogallala's Boot Hill, where cowboys, desperados, and frontier families were buried.  There were old tombstones among the weeds and a sculpture of a cowboy on a horse.  Are you jealous yet?

Lincoln, Nebraska

The weather had been oppressively hot and humid as we pulled into our Lincoln, Nebraska RV park, and one of our two air conditioners died, a potentially deadly catastrophe.  (Perhaps that's a slight exaggeration.)  The AC had popped a fuse.  I replaced the fuse, it would work for a while, then quit.  I asked the campground hosts if there was a mobile repairman who would come to the park and was given a card.  I called the fellow, who stressed that he would work as cheaply as humanly possible.  He arrived in a half hour, didn't find a specific problem but cleaned and rearranged the wiring .. and the unit did begin working.  He must have spent an hour here.  He charged us $300.  Bit of a con job.

I also found an RV and truck repair place to both do a routine maintenance of the motorhome (oil change, etc.) and to attach a sway bar bushing that had become dislodged.  They did the work in an hour at their shop and charged us $150.  In talking with the repairman it turned out that he grew up in Nebraska but had lived in Santa Cruz for a while before returning home.  Really nice guy, and honest.

Lincoln is both capital of Nebraska and the home of the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers.  We visited the university campus.  The student body was fairly diverse, and once again - as with most other college campuses we've seen - women outnumbered the men.  The times, they are a-changing.

That's Memorial Stadium, where the Cornhuskers play, in the background above.  Historically Nebraska has won five national collegiate football championships, but the last one was in 1997, and they are not nationally ranked this season.  I suppose it's difficult to attract top-flight prospects to Nebraska, particularly if the team is no longer considered a football power, even though we ourselves found Lincoln to be a very appealing city.

There is a fascinating museum on campus - the University of Nebraska State Museum.  It features Archie, fourteen feet tall, the largest Mammoth skeleton displayed anywhere and unofficial mascot of the university.  Mammoths were an elephant species, but much larger than the elephants of today.  Archie was discovered in 1921 when chickens unearthed some fossil bones on a nearby farm.  While we were there, art students were sketching various specimens throughout the museum.  That's Archie, the big guy on the left.

Nebraska for some reason is a treasure trove of fossils - elephants, rhinoceroses, dinosaurs, and so on.  The variety of species exhibited, most of them extinct, and the quality of the displays were breathtaking.  Don't miss this museum on your next trip to Lincoln.

The state capitol in Lincoln is a striking design, prettier from afar than the capitol building we toured in Des Moines, Iowa a few days ago.  The interior, however, while well done, isn't nearly as spectacular as Iowa's.

We were told by a long-winded tour guide that the legislature, unlike most states, is not divided into Democratic and Republican sections, and the politicians work for the people, not the party.  Uh-huh.  We also learned that like Iowa, Nebraska did not elect to receive Medicaid money from the federal government and therefore is paying much more for medical care than for example Minnesota, which opted into the program.  Nebraska citizens have obtained enough signatures to place an initiative on the ballot to reverse that decision, in order to bring medical costs down, and the seven-member Nebraska Supreme Court has ruled that the measure can indeed appear.

As the gentleman droned on, I walked away for a quieter study of the capitol architecture.  He said to Nancy, "I hope that wasn't because I was boring him."  Nancy said, "No, he's deaf."  That's a solid, believable excuse for my sporadic attacks of rudeness.  I hope she doesn't have to use it too often.

Politically, Lincoln is in a blue bubble surrounded by the little red bubble counties where corn is king.  Nancy learned of a soup kitchen in town, went down there and loved the volunteers she met.  In fact, we both like the people of Lincoln a lot (with a couple of exceptions), so much so that Nancy says she could live here except for the weather.

I have to report that on our last evening in Lincoln, Nancy called that air conditioning repair guy mentioned above and told him off for overcharging us.   Reamed him a new one.  Then she got into a heated political argument with the motorhome owner next door.  Surprisingly, I kind of like this new kick-ass, take-no-prisoners, assertive woman I'm traveling with.

Iowa

Now we head for Colorado, which is one of the states we will consider for a landing site.  It's beautiful, and while its winters are certainly cold, they aren't oppressive, because the skies are usually clear, resulting in mostly sunny days all year long.  We're hoping to time it so that we are able to observe the Colorado fall colors, which should be very pretty (if not quite on the same exalted level as the trees of New England).

The route to Colorado will take us across a couple of states which at first glance hold limited interest - Iowa and Nebraska.  But life is funny, and we're hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

Our first stop in Iowa was Dubuque, just across the state line from Wisconsin.   Not much to distinguish it from a hundred other similar towns, I'm afraid, and our RV park wasn't well kept up.  Dubuque did have a Buffalo Wild Wings sports bar, and I watched the 49ers beat the Detroit Lions somehow, in spite of stinking up the joint.

The high point of our visit was getting Nancy's new Fitbit smartwatch working by taking it to the support desk at Best Buy.

Iowa consists mostly of cornfields stretching monotonously from horizon to horizon. The drive from Dubuque to our next campground in Des Moines was an easy one, but there was high drama as our fuel supply got lower and lower as we drove for what seemed like fifty miles without a gas station in sight.  Finally one appeared, just in time.

Des Moines is the capital of Iowa.  The one attraction we found worth our time was the state capitol building.  Nancy and I do like to visit state capitols.  It's a quirk of ours.

The exterior of Iowa's statehouse, completed in 1886, with its five domes, including a gold-plated center one, is impressive, but not really to our taste.

But its interior is remarkably beautiful.

The law library is one of the most gorgeous rooms I've ever seen.  There are five levels - four balconies - of law books, accessed by a quartet of circular staircases.

The Senate and House of Representatives were not in session, and the building was not humming with activity.  Nancy opened the door to the offices of governor and lieutenant governor and asked a gentleman at his desk if we could take a couple of photos.  He turned out to be legal counsel to the governor.  I think he was bored or lonely because he spent quite a while showing us around and filling us in on some good Iowan history.  One interesting item was that the current ambassador to China is Terry Branstad, a former governor of Iowa, who has been on friendly terms with the President of China, Xi Jinping, since Xi visited him in Iowa some years back.  Iowa sells enormous quantities of soybeans and corn to China and has been somewhat hurt by the current tariffs that are in place.  He also told us that the legislature meets for just 100 days a year, and the senators and representatives receive only $25,000 in salary annually.

Here is that legal counsel, in the governor's reception room.  The photo originally included Nancy, but she insisted that I crop her out because she was having a bad hair day.

Madison, Wisconsin

We liked the college town of Madison so much on our first motorhome trip around the country seven years ago that we're having a second look.  Madison is the capital of Wisconsin and also home to the University of Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin state capitol is magnificent - certainly the most impressive architecture of any state house we've seen.

The interior is beautiful as well.  Unfortunately, the Wisconsin Senate and House were not in session and so didn't entertain us with the brilliance of their statesmanship.

It's strange how we remember certain details of that first big motorhome trip even as we've forgotten so many more substantial facts.  We both recall the great gouda cheese we bought seven years ago at a cheese shop across the street from the state capitol.  We found that store again and remain impressed by the variety and quality of their cheeses, both foreign and regional.  By the way, Wisconsin produces a wide variety of cheeses - not just those cheddars you see on the heads of Packers fans.



I'm sure it's unnecessary, but Nancy insisted that I clarify that that is not her at the display case.

The University of Wisconsin is in downtown Madison.  On the campus at the end of State Street is a food truck mall where you find about twenty food trucks serving exotic carryout meals from around the world.

It was invigorating to be in that collegiate environment among all those students who looked about fifteen years old.  Nancy and I thought we fit in perfectly.

The Wisconsin campus is great looking, with a number of distinctive buildings.  The university library there is enormous - certainly the biggest I've ever explored.  As an example, we found an entire floor of books in oriental languages.  Wikipedia tells me that this is the seventeen largest library in the US, just behind Stanford, and contains 8,500,000 volumes.

We have been fans of a specialty of the area, deep fried cheese balls, ever since we tried a dish of them at a restaurant during our visit to Lambeau Field last Monday.  Yesterday Nancy googled "deep fried cheese balls near me" and found them on the menu at a hole-in-the-wall called Sweet Home Wisconsin.  Her hot dog and my burger were excellent, but them fried balls were delectable!  Probably not to be found at restaurants outside Wisconsin and Minnesota, but man, deep fried cheese balls are a major culinary invention.  Unhealthy, yes, but life is too short to deny yourself if you ever find them on a menu.  Trust me on this.

We are indeed fans of this area.  Nancy says that she might want to live here if global warming ever made the Wisconsin winters mild.

Yesterday was Nancy's birthday.  A gentleman never reveals the age of a lady, and neither will I.  What I will reveal, though, is that she becomes more dear to me with each passing year.

Friday nIght lights and the Green Bay Packers

On our way to Green Bay we stayed one Friday night in an RV park in the small Wisconsin town of Peshtigo.  That evening, as I was outside grilling some ribeye steaks, I saw, across the street, overhead lights illuminating a high school football stadium, with two teams warming up.  After dinner we wandered over there, bought tickets, and found seats in the stands.  The game was in its second quarter.

We learned from people in the stands that the hometown Peshtigo Bulldogs were 3-0 on the season, and their opponent on this night was a neighboring small town, the Coleman Cougars,  We saw a long touchdown pass by Peshtigo just before halftime.  The level of play seemed pretty good.

All the players were white, as was everybody we saw in the stands.  In fact, the only evidence of diversity was that there was a girl on the visiting Cougar team (a wide receiver who didn't play while we were watching).  I had wondered whether the warnings of brain damage (CTE) from football collisions had stopped parents across the country from allowing their kids to play the game, but both teams looked chock full, so I don't think colleges and the NFL will run out of players any time soon.

Back in the dark ages when I was in high school, halftime featured the school bands marching in complex formations on the field.  On this night the Peshtigo high school band assembled in front of the stands and played a few numbers, while some cheerleaders sort of danced around on the field.  It was better when I was young.

This was football weather, a welcome change for us from the heat and humidity we'd experienced for the last few months, and late in the third quarter we got chilled and walked home.  The next morning we learned that Peshtigo had pulled out a close one and won 33-30.  Go, Bulldogs!

Our next campground was outside Green Bay and located on the Book Peninsula, which juts out from the mainland and turns north within Lake Michigan.  We drove along pretty waterfront towns as far as the attractive village of Egg Harbor.  There are lots of restaurants and vineyards all along the way, and many of the homes overlooking the water look very impressive.  We could envision living there, except that we'd be bored to death.

Sunday was the first NFL game day, and I watched the 49ers lose on TV to the Minnesota Vikings.  The Sunday evening TV game was between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears.  According to the people at our campground, many of whom were sporting Packer jerseys and caps, this was a grudge game and very important to the Packer community.  In the second quarter we watched the Packers' star quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, carted off the field with a knee injury.  Was he done for the season?  I'm sure that the fandom felt that the future of their team was in jeopardy, even more so when the Packers' backup quarterback had a meltdown, resulting in a 17-0 halftime deficit.  It appeared hopeless.  Nancy stopped watching and went to bed.  I switched the channel.

Later I checked the internet to see how badly the Packers were being embarrassed.  Amazingly, the score was 20-14.  So I returned to the game and watched as a hobbled Aaron Rodgers, at times hopping on one foot, threw an 81-yard touchdown pass to put the Packers ahead 24-23, which was the final score.

The next day we drove to Green Bay to tour Lambeau Field, where the Packers played in that amazing game the night before.  For some reason everybody there seemed giddy.  Our tour guide took us up to one of the luxury boxes high above the field.  A person could get used to this view!

She reminded us of the history of the Packers.  The team was founded by Curly Lambeau in 1919 and was one of the original teams when the NFL was founded in 1921.  (The Chicago Bears and Cleveland Browns are the other two original NFL members who remain in the league.)  The Packers claim twelve NFL championships, four after the Super Bowl was invented.

The Packers are the only NFL franchise without a single billionaire owner.  It is a publicly-owned company, with a board of directors and shares held by fans and individual investors.  When the stadium required expansion, because of economic need, additional shares were sold.  Last season, the Packers were the eighth most profitable NFL team, in spite of the fact that Green Bay is by far the smallest NFL city.  There's something charming about a team essentially owned by its hometown, rather than by some individual whose only virtue is his bank account.

Here we are down on the field, in front of the goal line where Bart Starr scored on a quarterback sneak in the legendary 1967 "Ice Bowl".

The tour of Lambeau Field was exciting and a lot more fun than the tour we took a few years ago of the new 49ers' Levi's Stadium, which in our opinion lacks personality, which Lambeau Field has in spades.

We also toured the Packers Hall of Fame, a museum of the history of the team.  They do have a bunch of great players and coaches to honor - among them Bart Starr, Jim Taylor, Paul Hornung, Vince Lombardi, Reggie White, Brett Favre, and at least one current player who will clearly be a hall-of-famer one day.  This is Aaron Rodgers' 2011 NFL MVP trophy.

Although the Packers' home stadium is much superior, I have to give it up to the 49ers Museum at Levi's Stadium, with its full-sized sculptures of the team's great stars (Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Bill Walsh, and many others) as a better exhibit to visit than the Packers' Hall of Fame.

Petoskey and Harbor Springs, Michigan

Northern Michigan grows a lot of wine grapes, and among the vineyards are many wineries.  From Traverse City we drove up the beautiful Old Mission Peninsula and dropped into the tasting room of the Black Star Winery, a large room with an enormous circular bar in the middle.  The customers on this Labor Day weekend were two deep around the bar.  We fled.

Further up the peninsula we tried the Brys Estate Winery, which had also been well reviewed.  It was busy as well, but the wait time was short, and the tasting process was innovative - like nothing we'd experienced before.  For $10 each, there were five tasting stations, each at a different part of the facility, and at each you could select a tasting of any one of their wines.  Very nice.  We began at a little counter in front of barrels where wine was aging in French oak.

Another of the five stations was in the Wooden Cask Room.

Unfortunately, we weren't impressed by the wines.  Some were perfectly fine and would be excellent for drinking on a hot summer day, but there were none we tried that were as good as many low-cost wines from the West Coast.  It's certainly possible that we simply haven't encountered the best of Michigan wines, or that we're accustomed to the style of the wines back in California.  And I certainly am happy that other parts of the country are growing grapes and hope they all continue to improve.  But California, Oregon, and Washington state are still king, queen, and jack.

Further up the eastern coast of Lake Michigan is the charming town of Petoskey, and we are staying in a KOA (Kampgrounds of America) park there.  Just around the corner from our campground is an excellent grocery store, and in its parking lot we spied a rusted out (but presumably still drivable) truck.  We pulled in next to it because our own sorry little pickup truck hasn't been looking or running so good lately and we thought the comparison would make us feel better about it.

Petoskey, a very pretty village, has wonderful downtown stores, including an exceptional shop where we picked up some great cheeses and pates.

Around twenty miles away is the possibly even lovelier seaside town of Harbor Springs. 

Harbor Spring's downtown streets feature a bunch of real estate offices, and we've never observed such a wide range of housing prices - from the multi-million dollar level of Santa Cruz beachside properties to decent-looking homes for less than $200,000. 

Just down the road from our campground is another RV park, the Hearthside Grove Motorcoach Resort.  We'd been hearing about this place from some of the upper crust motorhome crowd in Traverse City.  So we drove up to the gate, which was closed.  I used the intercom, telling the guy that we were motorhome owners and were interested in checking out their park for future use.  The gate opened.

It was Shangri-la.  Lush landscaping everywhere, and we drove in our ratty old truck past Prevost and Newell motorcoaches worth seven figures, in numbers we'd never come close to seeing before.  We soon realized that this resort was even a step up from our fancy park in Traverse City, and that our modest motorhome - which we love and respect - didn't belong there.  It was all a bit intimidating.  I wanted to drive our dirty pickup truck to the park office and ask about the cost of renting a space or buying a site here, but Nancy threatened me with bodily harm if I embarrassed her by doing that. 

There's a lot to like about Michigan's Upper Peninsula.  It looks prosperous and beautiful, and the people we've met have been warm, attractive, and super friendly.  But the winters are fierce, of course.  Some of the population lives here year round, but many are seasonal.  That is, they spend April to September here in their house or recreational vehicle, then head south to a second home or a different campground where the winters are more liveable.  If it weren't for the climactic challenges to old bones, I'd add this area to the list of possible landing spots.

Traverse City, Michigan

We are staying for five days at the RV park in Michigan's Upper Peninsula that that rich motorhome guy in New Orleans had told us about.  And the Traverse Bay RV Resort is indeed a gorgeous campground.

Our motorhome, which in some parks is among the two or three nicest RV units among all the residents, is definitely on the lower end here.  We are country mice.  The city mice own their own spaces, many with sheds, beautiful landscaping, and covered areas, and they drive million dollar motor coaches.  Obviously we need to step up our game.

On Thursday the park offered its residents and guests a free dinner of sausages and pasta.  We met and dined with a nice couple from Washington state who were politically compatible with Santa Cruz.

Traverse City has a very cool downtown, with lots of shops and restaurants.  We had lunch at an outdoor Mexican cafe.

On Saturday we shopped at a farmers' market in town, picking up oyster mushrooms, carrots, and beans.  Some serious but intermittent rain showers had us running for shelter.

Traverse City also features a couple of nice beaches on Traverse Bay, which extends down off Lake Michigan. Here we were in Michigan in September, and a lot of folks were taking advantage of the lovely warm weather.

In 1881 the Northern Michigan (Insane) Asylum was established in Traverse City as a psychiatric hospital (which reportedly treated its charges very kindly, in contrast with many such units in the country at that time).  Over the years the institution expanded its care to include patients with tuberculosis, polio, and drug addiction.  However, in 1989 the hospital closed and many of its buildings were demolished.  In 1993 the remaining property was transferred from the state to the Grand Traverse Commons Redevelopment Corporation, and over time extensive renovation of the buildings was accomplished and continues to this day.

The building complex is now called The Village at Grand Traverse Commons.  We found it fascinating to wander the undulating brick-lined halls of the old asylum, which has been converted to a space housing some interesting shops, businesses, and apartments.

We made Labor Day reservations at an Italian restaurant - Trattoria Stella - deep within the catacombs.

My dinner - including exceptional sweetbreads - was excellent, Nancy's less so - but regardless, it was a fun way to finish up our exploration of Traverse City.