The struggle southward

Tuesday, October 22nd.

This morning Wyoming greeted us with unpleasant wintery weather. It was another one of those mornings where we'd rather have stayed in our sleepingbags, holding on to the sparse heat we'd built up overnight. But we got up and got back on I-25 heading south towards Colorado.

Not far down the road, however, it started raining. This would ordinarily not be a big problem, except for the fact that we have no functioning heater in the van which meant that the water froze upon hitting our windshield, quickly covering it in a layer of ice that we couldn't see through. This naturally made driving the van a bit more strenuous that usual. However, we figured out that our little cigarette-lighter heater could be placed on the dashboard in front of the driver and melt a small hole in the ice on the windshield, just big enough to navigate by. Pretty crazy. Soon after, though, the rain turned to hail, and we pulled into a gas station to find shelter and wait for the hailstorm to pass. Other people were having the same problem as us, we discovered, since the gas station was all out of ice scrapers. The weather didn't clear up as quickly as we'd hoped, so we stuck around for a couple of hours and had some breakfast/lunch while passing the time. Around noon a whole group of local school kids suddenly descended on the gas station. Apparently that was the best place they could find to spend their lunch break. They thought at first that we were hunters, and when we explained that we were just travelling through they wondered what had brought us to such an inhospitable corner of Wyoming (weather-wise, that is; the people were very kind). We didn't have much of an explanation for that, other than that we were just trying to get south as quickly as possible, to escape the bad weather.

A while after they'd left we decided to carefully try to continue our journey. The heater continued to keep it's small area ice-free, but it wasn't really enough to navigate by, so we pulled off at nearly every exit along the way to scrape ice off the windshield. Since we hadn't been able to get a scraper at the gas station we had to resort to using cd jewel cases; the one thing that we have plenty of by now. It worked fairly well, although it meant sacrificing a few cases along the way.

After what seemed like an unending drive through a desolate and unfriendly landscape we finally made it to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and stopped there to try to hunt down some warmer clothes to bundle up in. Between us we had only one thin pair of gloves and one thick down jacket, the latter being one that Dan's cousin Mark had lent us for the trip west.

The first thing we found, though, was a record store, so we went in there to thaw and warm up -- and naturally couldn't resist buying a few cd's :) Following directions from the girl that worked there we found two thrift stores in the area. Among other things we bought scarves (the best 50 cents we've spent in a long time!) and gloves for both of us as well as two good comforters to add to Jens' eggcrate-foam bed. We bought it all with the gift money left over from buying the heater and thus made it all a gift from Dan's aunt Connie.

After both our fingers, toes and the ice on our windshield had thawed we left Cheyenne and continued south on I-25 towards Denver, Colorado. The overcast weather and the ice on our windshield had done a good job of obstructing our view of the scenery all day and the oncoming dusk as we entered Colorado didn't help much. Our original plan had been to make a stop in Denver and perhaps to visit Boulder as well. But as we entered the city in the early evening we realized that between the fog, smog and darkness there would be no view of the Rocky Mountains -- and that even if there had been we were way too cold and miserable to be able to enjoy it. So we looked at our map and tried to find a place that sounded warm. Pueblo, CO, sounded like just the place, we decided, and drove on into the night with images of a sunny and warm Spanish settlement in the middle of the desert.

Pueblo was nothing of the sort, or course. But it was at a significantly lower elevation than Denver and although it was still quite chilly it was nevertheless possible to move around outside while remaining in contact with all body parts. We exited the interstate on the outskirts of town and found ourselves in the perfect constellation of shopping malls. Within a two minute radius from where we found ourselves was a Popeye's restaurant, a movie theater and a Wal-Mart. It didn't take much imagination to combine those three to make complete evening of dinner, a movie and a place to sleep. So we did just that; ate fried chicken at Popeye's, saw "Knockaround Guys" at the movie theater (and smuggled in toothbrushes and toothpaste to take advantage of the nice restrooms after the movie) and then drove over to Wal-Mart and parked there for the night.