September 14 - 18, 2024
On Sunday, September 15 John went on a guided motorcoach tour of Mesa Verde National Park. I still wasn't feeling well so stayed home to rest.
The Ancestral Pueblo people (formerly Anasazi, which means "the ancient foreigners") lived in the area from about AD 550 to the early 1200s. They started out building pit houses, and eventually built stone communities in the sheltered alcoves of canyon walls. They grew most of their food, but supplemented it with wild plants and hunting. No one knows why they left the area, but they went south into today's New Mexico and Arizona. Today the Hopi of northern Arizona and the people of Zuni, Laguna, Acoma, and the pueblos along the Rio Grande trace their ancestry to the Ancestral Pueblo people of this area.
(If it seems like these pictures are in the wrong order it's because they area. No matter which way I selected them I got the same results.)
Monday we made our way to Walmart in Cortez to get some shopping done. It had been a couple of weeks since we'd seen a Walmart.
Tuesday we went on the Durango-Silverton train.
We drove to Durango and got on a bus to take us to Silverton. We went over a couple of mountain passes on Highway 550, and there were a few places that dropped straight down a cliff with no guard rails. It was a beautiful ride in spite of the rain. The aspens are starting to turn and they are so pretty!
Photo above credit Jimmie Folse.
Fresh snow on the mountains.
I was glad to see Silverton as we came down the mountain pass. It hasn't changed much.
We had 2-1/2 hours in Silverton to get something to eat and do some shopping.
The temperature was in the 40s and several bands of rain and wind came through, so it was really cold (we heard that the pass we came over that morning had three inches of snow on it by 2:30). The elevation was over 9,000'. I bought a hooded sweatshirt and ended up putting it on over my sweater and under my coat. By the time we got on the train car I was freezing. Fortunately with all the people on the train car it warmed up in 30-45 minutes, and by then we had started our 3-1/2 hour trip back down to Durango. I had done the train before, once in the early 60s where we road the train up to Silverton and back to Durango. Back then they used coal on the steam engines and at the end of the day we all had little bits of coal in our hair. That was a really long day so the next time, in 1967, we rode the train one way and the bus the other. I'd wanted to do this again but never had the chance until now. I'm really glad I could do it but probably won't do it again. Third time is the charm.
It was 7pm by the time we got back. A long day but very much worth it.
Today is a free day so I'm catching up on the laundry. Tonight the group is having hobo soup, where everyone brings a can of something and in the soup it goes. Since I wouldn't be able to eat it I'm going to make some hamburger soup for myself and then we'll have dinner for a few days and I won't need to cook.
Tomorrow we'll be...
Roving on...
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth".
Genesis 1:1
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