Well, the trip back to Lansing is pretty well planned out now and reservations have been made. It’s going to be a semi-leisurely one week road trip with the last day and a half just putting the miles behind us between Denver and Lansing. (There is a live link to this map on the “Maps” tab.)
Actually, the first day will be rather long, too. We’re going to be spending the night at Canyon de Chelly at the Thunderbird Lodge and will have to get up early that morning to make it there by mid-day. It’s 300 miles over mostly 2-lane road and a one hour loss going from MST (Arizona) to MDT (Navaho Nation). We have reservations for the jeep tour down into the Canyon at 1pm. Due to high water, I was unable to take this tour when I was here in late April 2005 (see RV journal on “Links” tab) and look forward to it this time. Ken hasn’t been to Canyon de Chelly at all.
Tuesday morning we’ll do one or both rim drives (my journal says north rim is more picturesque) then head on up to Durango, CO. Naturally, we’ll stop at Four Corners for a photo op there.
Then it’s three nights in Durango. We’re taking the Durango-Silverton train on Thursday. It’s a special narrated trip with one re-enactor on the way up and another on the way down. That leaves Wednesday open and we’re going to try for a day trip to nearby Mesa Verde. That decision will be weather dependent – no sense going if it’s pouring rain. I was there in mid-May 2008 but Ken hasn’t seen it yet. It’s definitely worth a second trip for me.
We leave Durango on Friday and will be taking the scenic route up to Glenwood Springs where we’ll pick up I-70 and blast into Denver for the next couple of nights. We’ve got reservations for a micro-brew tour at noon on Saturday, but otherwise our plans our flexible. I had wanted to take a tour of the Denver Mint but 1) it’s not open on the weekend and 2) reservations were booked out into July. So two other options are the Molly Brown house (“Unsinkable Molly Brown”) as a probable before or after the beer tour and the Colorado Railroad Museum on Sunday morning.
After the Railroad museum, it’s lunch and ~500 miles east on I-76 & I-80 to Lincoln, NE (CDT). Pushing it on Sunday means it’s only ~725 miles to Lansing on Monday (EDT). I’ll try to post as we go along, but, frankly, blog writing takes a bit of time and we don’t have a lot of down time in there.
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