Susan and Benoit's adventures in the USA, and somewhere else.
"There's something good waitin down this road, I'm pickin up whatever is mine....runnin down a dream."
Monday, 14 January 2013
Day 6: Snow or not snow?
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We left Amarillo at around 8:20 am this morning to start driving North towards Colorado. The drive was quite boring. It turns out that the roads on North Texas are very straight, the landscape is very flat and the only interesting things are cows and pumpjacks. It was very cold but dry until we arrived close to the New Mexico border.
Crossing the border meant that we entered the Mountain time zone, which meant that we get an hour more! This is also when there started to be snow on the road. Not much but enough to make it a more interesting drive. By the time we arrived in Raton, on I-25, it was severely snowing and plows were in action all around. We stopped at the restaurant of the Oasis Motel. The reviews on Yelp were good but we thought that it was just OK. Susan had enchiladas while I had a club sandwich. I made the mistake of replacing the fries with some salad. Of course, it ended up being iceberg with light oil and white vinegar. Mmmm, tasty!
At this point, we decided that it would be too dangerous to venture in the mountains of Colorado with a loaded car, so we would go directly towards Denver without going to the Great Sand Dunes National Park.
Susan then drove us out of Raton and she had loads of fun driving a stick on snow (maybe). We started climbing the Raton Pass which is the limit between New Mexico and Colorado. We had quite a surprise when we crossed the border between the two states.
There was only very little snow in Colorado compared to New Mexico. It seems that all the bad weather was located South of the border moutains. We drove a little bit and the situation only got better. So when we arrived in Walsenburg, we drove West towards the dunes. Then I don't remember because I was asleep. I woke up just in time to witness our passage of the North La Veta Pass at 9,413 ft (2869 m).
We then proceeded to the Great Sand Dunes and this was magical. The sky was blue and the dunes majestic. We spent some time at the visitor center and then walked to the bottom of the dunes. It was frigid cold but it also felt good to go outside for a while.
Finally we drove to Salida where we had a pizza dinner at Amica and arrived at the hotel at around 7.30 pm. We took advantage of the pool which felt more like a big hot tub but passed on the hot tub which felt like a big tea kettle.
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