That wasn’t really much of a vacation.
Let me start off by saying that I’ve been skiing with this same group of individuals on and off since 1999.
This year, instead of doing a New Mexico trip we decided to ski Colorado, specifically Wolf Creek. That resort is sort of in the middle of nowhere and you must stay about 30 miles to the south or north of it. We stayed south of it, in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.
We were informed by a family friend of mine, a couple weeks prior to our departure date, that they have had a LOT of snow up there this year, in fact, so much that they’re not really even sure what to do with it all and at one time some major roads were closed. I passed this information on to the group, so we mapped out a route that included no closed roads, and mostly 4 lane highway.
Until…
We arrived in Albuquerque and the boy car got a fancy Chrysler Aspen with a Navigation System.
At this point, if you’re smart, you’re making the leap with me. We ended up on a bad road; thank you NAV system. WARNING: DO NOT TAKE NM 112. We were all going along at 65mph when *boom* we hit snow covered road. The NAV system said it should save us 45 minutes. Yay. However, we’re now in the middle of nowhere, with no cell service and it’s 19 degrees outside. And it gets worse.
After going through a rough patch of snow/muck covered road, the guys realize that their Aspen (both rentals are 4wd SUVs- the other was a Durango) was leaking fluid from the radiator. So we have to stop, and let their truck cool- then we go as far as we can until the engine gets hot again, and then stop. Long story short it took us 5 hours to go 26 miles, and we crossed through an Apache Indian reservation on the way (going over cattle guards every couple miles should have been a good clue).
In the end, the Aspen finally refused to start again. At this point it’s 2:45 am and I am on 4 hours of sleep, since I was pitched from the back of a piss-headed steed the day before. I’m mad because I can’t call anyone to rescue us and I’m mad because I had told both drivers that we needed to stay OFF back roads. So we have to pile 8 people into seating for 5, and drop some of the luggage into the Aspen and get in to Pagosa, at the least to drop off some people and the luggage that we have in that vehicle and we’ll just have to come back and get the rest.
We arrived at our destination at 4am and we should have technically been there by midnight. Uh huh. We could nearly have driven from Dallas to Pagosa in the time that it took us to fly to NM and drive up. Irritating to say the least.
I’ll finish this in another post; this one is already really long.
What's on your mind?