Towing the Jeep also makes the Truck Camper a much less annoying option than if we took the camper by itself.
As usual, our first stop after leaving Havasu was El Paso to see Paul's mom. She was doing fine, so we only stayed a couple of days.
We wanted our route to Massachusetts to include Bayfield Colorado, even though it entailed a little backtracking from El Paso.
Along the way we stopped in Santa Fe New Mexico to do some shopping and hiking. We spent two nights at a federal campground with no cell signal, which was nice in some ways, not in others (ok maybe Paul asks me now every time I book something if it has cell reception).
The trail we chose to hike was Picacho Peak, a 4.5 mile hike with 1200 ft of elevation gain.
What that got us was an awesome view of the surrounding area.
After our hike, we drove the scenic drive up to the top of the mountain. The elevation was high enough that the trees we saw were Aspens. They were an incredibly vibrant Apple Green, which only happens in the spring time.They were so bright green, they looked like grass.
Having burned innumerable calories, and, perhaps not being in a rush to get back to our campsite, we rewarded ourselves with dinner out. We love New Mexican food, usually, but the restaurant we chose wasn't the best choice. The food was good, but it was much too spicy for us. That's very unusual for us but what we both noticed is that it had a lot of heat, but not a lot of flavor.
From Santa Fe we went to Bayfield, CO to see our friends Tom and Dianne. We met them years ago, when we were all fulltimers. They have since sold their rig and are enjoying having some acreage again.
Tom managed to find a project for the guys to work on ( their son was also visiting), but we still had plenty of time to sit around and socialize.
While looking at a map, planning a route from Bayfield to Denver ( My entire goal for the next month is to hike as much as possible), we saw that Great Sand Dune National Park was along our route. We'd never been there,so we made it our next stop.
The dunes were created when the sand from the nearby San Juan mountains blew towards the Sangre de Cristo mountains. There it was trapped, and the opposing winds blew the sand into huge dunes.
It didn't go the way we planned at all- one hike we wanted to do was thru a creek that was still too flooded with spring melt, and when we looked at the size of the dunes, I decided it could be an issue for my foot (had surgery on it a few years ago) so instead, we just drove the park roads.And then we were ready to move on.
