Last leg

It truly blows my mind, but after I left Austin, I had just one last week to close the loop on my 7.5 month North American road trip extravaganza. Heading north out of Texas, it was finally getting too chilly out for me to comfortably sleep in my car wherever I found myself when darkness fell. That made the trip feel almost over more than anything else, really.

After Austin, I visited my friends, the R family, in Oklahoma City. When I was in Madagascar and S and B were teaching at the American school in Antananarivo, their son N was barely a toddler, and their daughter A was only just in utero when they returned to the States at about the same time I left Mada. Look at them now!!

We had a great (though too short, of course) catch-up for an overnight, and then I made the day-long trek from OKC to colorful Santa Fe, NM.

I'm lucky enough to have gotten to visit Santa Fe several times in the past, so with the weather and calendar ticking in my ear, I didn't linger more there more than one night before hopping up to Ojo Caliente hot springs--a place I'd long heard of but never previously made it to.

SO worth the trip, especially for the mud pool, which I haven't ever gotten to experience anywhere else. You're supposed to soak down in the pool, get out and slather mud from a poolside clay pot all over yourself with a big paddle, and then sit and bake in the sun till the mud dries before hopping back in the mud pool to wash off the crusty layer. I tried real hard to follow the routine but it was too chilly for me to succeed in sitting in a lawn chair until I was fully dry. I may have cheated.

And then, I kind of cemented my apparent obsession with hot springs (how did this happen? I LOVE them!) and headed north to Valley View Hot Springs (operated by the Orient Land Trust) in Villa Grove, CO. I crossed back into what now feels like my second home state under the cover of darkness (which is falling so early these days! Gone is my summer of 11 p.m. sunsets in northern Canada), got a bunk bed at the springs lodge, and woke in the morning to this view out of the window of the lovely San Luis Valley.

This place was on my Colorado hit list for pretty much the entire 6 years I was living in Denver, and I never made it out there any weekend, so it felt like a moral imperative to work it into my itinerary. Valley View has a bunch of pools spread out over the property, and when I walked to the most distant trio, just a quarter-mile from the lodgings, I was completely by myself for the 2+ hours I floated, daydreaming, in the perfectly warm water. I had quite a roster of road tripping adventures to think back on and appreciate in the crisp, quiet autumn morning…which quickly became afternoon.

Finally, fully saturated, soaked, and scrubbed clean, I climbed back into my car for the penultimate time and watched the sun begin to set behind the Rockies…

…on my way to Avon for the weekend. There, I unpacked my beloved CRV home/car, detail cleaned it in preparation for our impending goodbye, and then with just the couple of bags I'll need for the next month or so, I made the finally leg of the drive down to Denver, arriving where I started out from way back on April 1. Not quite able to believe it was over.