Heading home. So here we are on our way home, in the words of the song. In The Hilton Garden Inn in Denver after flying from Durango yesterday (a smooth flight this time). Mrs Summerhouse has just been out of the hotel to check our money situation. This on our dollar credit card for lack of a better term. I wouldn’t say this arrangement has been an unadulterated success it being rather better at taking our money and turning into dollars rather than giving it back.
Anyway it (the card) coughed up some lolly as we say in England (getting back to the vernacular) but we don’t have any idea how much is still there to be spent but we have enough for a taxi to the airport, even with a tip. We’ve just tipped the serving person at our hotel, as above, even though he didn’t do a thing, it being a self-service breakfast.
Yesterday we came from the airport to the hotel on the train. $10.50 for the two of us (with concessions for the elderly). A lot cheaper than the close to $100 for the taxi. But the problems with the train is that this hotel was somewhat further away from Union Station than the last one. By the time we’d wheeled our heavy suitcases through the streets to this hotel we were, to use the vernacular again, cream-crackered. So to hell with the expense, taxi for us. The children did the same yesterday and they’re back in England and home now so it must work.
Last night, in an effort to use up the money we’re not sure we have on the card, we went out for a relatively slap up meal. Since the shock of the extortionate i.e. rip-off meal I wrote about in a previous blog, we’ve avoided expensive meals, not easy with the exchange rate and the price of things in America generally. If you’re visiting then, as they say, buyer beware. Oh, and avoid over-enthusiastic servers – yes, the bison steak is hung-dried for 6 months to reduce the gamey taste, it’s wonderful etc.
But if you can put the economics and the over-enthusiasm to one side, as we have, then we can say, we’ve had a great time. But I won’t reflect on the trip until we get home and have chance to consider the impact of this trip from a distance.
I will say that our time in Durango has been interesting. I suppose it has changed over the 30 plus years we’ve been coming here but it still retains significant elements of the cowboy town it was then. I don’t know whether sitting on the veranda of our old hotel watching a forest fire decimate the distant hillsides counts as cowboy time but it’s certainly something you wouldn’t see much of in the Yorkshire Dales. Of all the hazards our vineyards is threatened by forest fires isn’t one of them. You see I’m starting to think of home again.
Just before I do let me tell you on Monday / Tuesday we revisited a place we used to stay (O Bar O) and our land one more time without the kids. The next day we drove to Mesa Verde and a winery nearby Cortez, by American standards. Interesting, I may write more about it at a later date.
Anyway, so now I’ve made a start on the Thursday morning of our return trip, we’re going to set off to the airport. And here we are at Denver airport which is good – in a way but bad in the sense that we’re ridiculously early. That’s the trouble with now being keen to get home, you do things too early. So we have a very long wait but then if I don’t post this while I’m here, it’s not going at all. Understand?
Heading home summary
Now it’s going to be too early but that’s the perils of life on road and heading home.