We woke up, broke down camp, packed everything back onto the llamas and made our way back down the mountain. We had told Keith and Charlie that we’d meet them in the ski resort parking lot around 2, and that’s exactly when we arrived. The boys were waiting for us.
We quickly extracted our gear from Stuart’s packs, threw it all in the car-top carrier, said tender, heartfelt goodbyes to the llamas and took off back down the mountain. In Arroyo Seco, we stopped for ice cream and caught each other up on the last couple of days.
Keith and Charlie — who never completely adjusted to the altitude and still looked a little green when we reunited — had signed up for a river rafting trip on their first full day alone. Keith developed a fascination with one of the other guests on the excursion, an outspoken and flamboyant professional opera singer who, with his wife and kids, was taking a break from performances at the Santa Fe Opera, a renowned festival that happens every July and August. So we heard all about him.
After ice cream, we collected the Teardrop from the creepy SnowMansion, where we had left it for three days, then aimed the van north and commenced the three-day drive back to Indiana. About 45 minutes into the trip, we came upon a long stretch of gravelly highway; for miles, the top layers of asphalt had been stripped off as part of a major resurfacing project. No big deal; unfazed, we continued at a prudent speed — until suddenly a loud shot rang out. Shaken, we took a few moments to deduce that an errant pebble must have hit the car. Phew. We’re okay. Then, a few moments later, Clare whimpered from her seat directly behind the driver. “Mom? Dad? Um…” We turned to see her looking horrified and pointing to the moonroof, which spans the van’s passenger row — shattered into a million pieces. The pane was still intact, but the tiny cracks zigzagged ominously across the entire surface.
Luckily we had been within a mile or two of the small town of Questa, NM, on the western edge of the Carson National Forest, and we pulled into the first parking lot we found. We turned off the engine and boosted ourselves up to the roof of the van to assess the damage. A total fluke: The wheels of the van kicked up a piece of gravel and it somehow sailed into the space between the top of the van and the bottom of the car-top carrier, ricocheted off the bottom of the car-top carrier and shattered the moonroof. The glass was deeply chipped in one distinct spot, and the impact splintered the entire pane of glass. We could hear it crackle and pop like a bowl of Rice Krispies.
While the chips in the glass did not completely penetrate the moonroof, and no shards fell into the van’s cabin, I fretted that the vibrations and bumps of everyday interstate travel would, over 1,200 miles, eventually dislodge all the chunks of glass and cause them to either fly into the windshields of cars behind us, or cave in on top of us. I refused to continue the trip without some kind of temporary fix. Luckliy, we had pulled into the parking lot of Questa Lumber and Hardware. So we took everything out of the car-top carrier and removed it from the top of the van. Then we all trekked into the hardware store where we bought duct tape and a roll of Visqueen from the paint aisle. Charlie took charge and covered the top of the van with plastic, then taped up ceiling inside the van, as well.
After we got the car-top carrier reattached and all of our gear re-sorted and stored, we got back on the road. The sound of the plastic flapping and fluttering in the wind was unnerving, though, and we stopped every so often to make sure the duct tape hadn’t come undone to allow the sheet of plastic to billow behind us like a parachute as we streak down the highway.
We wound our way through northern New Mexico and into southern Colorado where we eventually joined up with Interstate 25. We planned to overnight in Pueblo, but once we got here, found that there’s some kind of convention going on, and rooms are hard to come by. After calling around and backtracking a bit, we found a vacancy at the Baymont Inn & Suites, wedged between the freeway and the Pueblo Mall.
No comments:
Post a Comment