The Fit and I

It’s always hard when I have to be dropped at the airport early in the morning.  The whole family has to get up in the dark with me.  This morning Emma was a sport about being woken up at 6 a.m., but I was less happy about it.  Actually, I would have been OK with 6 a.m., but Eleanor mis-read her watch at 4:20 a.m. and woke me up then, thinking that it was nearly time to get up anyway.

That wasn’t the most glorious start, but at least the flight was uneventful and nobody sneezed on me.  I may yet survive this flight without a cold.  From the jetway, it was three moving walkways, three escalators, and an underground train ride just to get from Concourse B at DIA to the Main Terminal.  Huge place, and yet it looks just like every other modern airport in the continental US.

Fred Coldwell met me at the airport. Fred writes the “Old Aluminum” column for Airstream Life magazine, and he also writes the “From The Archives” photo spread that we run every issue.  He has been storing our car in his garage since September, so I took him out for lunch before hitting the highway.

Since the lunch was long and included discussion of business (IRS take note), I didn’t get on the road until 1 p.m.  Fortunately, the speed limit along most of I-25 is 75 MPH, so the Fit and I were able to make some good time and wound up in Las Vegas NM by 6 p.m.  That’s 300 miles from Denver, a reasonable start on my 900 mile roadtrip.

I have been wanting to drive I-25 for a while.  It passes through a section of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico that we never visited in the Airstream.  As I suspected, from the interstate highway there’s not a lot to be seen (other than a range of mountains to the west all day, and a lot of grassland) but there are a lot of hidden things to investigate on a future trip.  The historic Santa Fe trail passes by here, and there’s quite a bit of old railroad history too.   Some summer we will check it all out with the Airstream.  Right now it’s too cold for me, and there’s snow on the ground, which is my cue to keep heading south.