Continued from before…

After many phone calls and time pouring over the map we thought to call our friends who often camp on their parents land in Cedaredge. Thankfully, they were there camping and were happy to invite us along. So we spent our 4th with good friends listening to our dog viciously bark at their dogs. The next day we got moving early and I took to the phone again, looking for a place to camp the night. Our friends Chris and Shenan had planned to meet us our second day in Crawford, so we were trying to find a place that would take all of us. Again luck was on our side and I secured the last two camping spots in Ouray, one of my most favorite places in Colorado. It was in an RV park, but it didn’t matter, there was shade and so much to do and amazing scenery… and showers!

We spent the evening cleaning up and relaxing. Chris and Shenan offered to keep our kids for the night in their camper so we even had some alone time. The next morning we walked to the local coffee shop before joining up with our friends (and kids!). We spent the afternoon swimming in the hotsprings pool before lightning forced us to leave. So we all piled into Chris and Shenan’s camper and the kids napped (begrudgingly) and the adults played cards. On our way out of town we ate at the True Grit Cafe in Ridgway which is a homage to John Wayne because he filmed True Grit in Ridgway. And we were off to Gunnison.

I wasn’t thrilled about going to Gunnison because I had pictured it as a cute mountain town and when we drove through a couple days before I found out that it was nothing at all like I’d imagined. Also because we had tried to cancel our hotel room in favor of more camping but the hotel made up a new policy at the last minute that they didn’t accept cancellations in July. I had argued and argued with them days before about canceling, but didn’t have the emotional stamina to take it any further. So we just decided to go ahead with our reservations. It ended up fine. We used the time there to bathe(!) and do laundry and I had a touch of food poisoning or something, so I wasn’t up to hiking all over the place anyway. Plus the reason we were in that area of Colorado was to camp at the Dinner Station campground, rated the highest by our camping book. Dinner Station was described as the campground that you visit as a child and continue to visit every year thereafter.

Unfortunately our tastes must be quite different that the author of this book. Dinner Station was past Taylor Reservoir in a field of sagebrush and pine trees and was alongside a creek. It was ok, but by no means an amazing campground that we would travel several hours to visit every year. The campsites were close together, with many of the parking spots right on the road. There was well water provided, but the hand pump it came out of was so rusty that the water was brown. We planned to go ahead and stay but the people in our reserved spot from the night before hadn’t quite packed up yet, so we drove around exploring a bit. We ended up at a campground on the other side of the mountains called Mosca. It was right on a lovely fishing lake and the camp spots were a little more private. Jim was worried about running out of gas and I like the spot better so we just decided to forgo our reservations and stay at Mosca.

The water system at Mosca had dried up, and we had very little drinking water with us. (I had forgotten to fill up our big jug in Gunnison.) We were a little worried about what we were going to do about drinking water until Jim remembered that we still had water in the camper’s reservoir. So we had enough drinking water and we boiled our rusty water from Dinner Station to wash and rinse dishes and one crisis was avoided! We fished to no avail and enjoyed the evening, roasting marshmallows. This campground was the coldest we stayed at, even though the elevation was lower than Lake Irwin. It got down to 33 degrees that night. Times like that, we were thankful for the camper!

Rather than stay another night without good water, we decided to pack up and spend our last two nights camping at a campground that we knew was good. So we headed back towards home and camped at Silverjack Reservoir. It was beautiful and relaxing until the dog decided to go after Honor. Honor was just trying to pet him and he just went after him, barking viciously, baring his teeth and snapping. I picked Honor up to get him out of the way as Jim pulled the dog back. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jim so mad. Tuck spent the rest of his evening laying on his back under the table of the camper. We kept him tied up so he couldn’t reach the sleeping children. And we decided that we could no longer keep him in our family. It’s just not worth risking our kids or anyone else’s.

The last couple days, we made sure to keep him away from the kids, and when we hiked down to the reservoir, we left him in the camper. I think this was the first time that Jim got to truly relax because the dog wasn’t tied to him. Plus he caught a bunch of fish. Eden and I got bored and hiked back up to our spot. We spent the afternoon knitting and coloring. It took 12 days, but I finally relaxed! We headed home the next day, completely filthy and ready to come home.

Overall, it wasn’t the lounge around, be limp-as-a-noodle vacation that I had anticipated. But I got to spend some really good time with Jim. Because he was there, the kids behaved and were really enjoyable. The dog stress/incidents were really upsetting, but I feel like we’ve done everything we could with him and hopefully we can find a great, childless home for him to go to.