Last night is the kind of night I dread the most. The night before a flight can be stressful. Leaving the house and the business is one thing but I worry that flight day will be the one day of my life that I sleep late or can’t get out the door quick enough to be on time for that 7:40 to Atlanta. I hate going through security when they start yelling about take off your shoes! Take off your belt, empty your pockets, put all electronics out on the table and put that toothpaste over here before you hurt someone with it! I miss the days of travel before 9/11. Mimi and I are on a flight to Denver where we will begin our mountain break from, well, life. We know and love Colorado, we cut our teeth together and with Max and Mia in the Rocky Mountains. My heart skips a beat when we are coming in for a landing upon sight of those cool TeePee looking tops on the Denver airport. We know to pack for the low lands where there will be a heat wave with some of that famous “dry heat”.
We will also pack for cold, windy and possible precipitous weather. We will be at the top of Mount Evan’s or now known as Blue Sky Mountain at 14,260 it is Colorados second highest mountain. I think the name was recently changed for some reason or another. Mt. Blue sky is known for it’s very unpredictable weather. They say it’s better to be off the summit by noon or so because a storm is likely. Once you get above 10,000 feet you have to know what to do to keep from getting hypothermia and how to not get struck by lighting. Humans are great lighting rods as we are full of water and electrolytes , just what lightning is seeking. At that height, usually above tree line, we are usually amongst the taller things up there. Lighting travels at 260,000 miles per hour at 55,000 degrees, 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun. It’s a wonder that anyone survives a lightning strike. We try our best to avoid these situations while earnestly try our very best to be right in the middle of these situations, that’s the crazy part. You have take some risks to have the high mountain experience. There are many books and poems written about the drive in some people to pursue these kinds of experiences.
Hypothermia can happen really quickly and unexpectedly. It doesn’t have to be super cold to wind up in a very scary situation. It happens when your body gets to cold down to the core and it uses all your reserves to try to warm itself up. I have experienced hypothermia a few times and I and the kids had to get Mimi out of a scary situation. We had been 9 days on the trail in the Tetons. We came across a beautiful mountain lake in the Alaska Basin in the Tetons. We all decided we would take badly needed cat baths. We needed it so bad I think even the bears were repelled by our scent. We were hooping and hollering as we dipped our feet and heads into the refreshing but cold as ice lake water. I looked up to see that Mimi had bitten the bullet and gone in full body swimming, screaming from the chilly thrill. I thought she would turn around quickly to come back to shore. Instead she swam to the other side and back. I don’t know how she did it. When she got on shore I could see right away that something was wrong. Her body was uncontrollably shaking and worse, she was talking nonsense. That shaking is her body trying to warm itself up but she doesn’t have enough reserves to get there especially having been hiking hard for that many days previously and we were very high up in altitude. We got her in her down sleeping bag and every body rubbed her arms and legs with lots of friction to get the blood flowing, meanwhile we made her a cup of hot tea and got her to drink it slowly while she babbled on about nothing for about 20 minutes. Lots of bad decisions have been made in the high mountains due to not being able to think correctly from hypothermia. We all learned a lesson that day and at least the kids will know what to do if someone gets into that situation again. Part of our packing included clothes that will get us through any predictably unpredictable situations. I imagine we will have a 4 am start in order to get up and out before the chance of storms increase. After one like that we love to grab a bite and in this case head back to a beautiful Airbnb that Mimi found at about 7 to 8,000 feet that should be nice and cool. We can rest the remaining part of the day away in the hot tub repairing our muscles. We will land in Denver today and go straight to a reggae festival in Denver where it will be nice and warm. Tomorrow morning we head up in altitude to the rented house.
The only other day that we have fully planned out will be the day we take the train through the Royal Gorge. The train runs next to the Arkansas River for a couple of hours. On this train you can sit in an air conditioned coach and you can walk out to the open air viewing cars. When that’s done we will get to the top of the gorges and walk along a high bridge looking down at where we just were. It looks like they have some sling chairs that send you flying over the 1,000 foot deep gorge, should be thrilling, we shall see who chickens out. The Atlanta to Denver leg of our flight got interesting as our seat neighbor was an 81 year old lady from Cape Town, South Africa. She was going to visit her son and his family in the same little town where our Airbnb would be. As she was describing her life back home I knew immediately that she was a gardener. We both pulled out our phones and began showing off our yards photos like proud parents. She had Protea blooming and massive Aloe plants blooming in the middle of winter which is right now. She said the low temp there is around 40 degrees if I figured my Celsius to Fahrenheit correctly. There were roses blooming but she said only for about two weeks. It looked like our west coast, rocky and aired, just the way succulents love it. Mimi sells dried protea blooms at Garden Works, it was great to see the plants that host those blooms, the foliage looked kind of like our Autumn Joy Sedum. It looked like she got around pretty good in her garden and I wouldn’t doubt that we might see her hiking around the mountain town where we will be staying. It’s a small world after all.
The day after the concert in the Denver area I can reflect at the sights and sounds we experienced. There were several west coast reggae bands that played before Ziggy Marley took over the stage. 4 songs into it the lighting got bad enough for them to get Ziggy off the stage and to protect his equipment. Mimi and I found a little overhang to stand under while the light rain finished. The weather is quick to change in Colorado, the double rainbows showed up and the coast was clear for the rest of the night. Sublime showed up next and blew my eardrums out then the reason we came to this show was next. Stick Figure came on just as it was getting dark around 9 pm. The vibe got funkier the later it got, the band put on a great show and had members from the previous bands back on stage with them from time to time. We had a blast, met a few people and danced the night away.
The next morning we had a big, mean breakfast and a leisurely drive to the Denver Botanical Garden. We are sure that we want to get into aquatic gardening now that our spillway has been corrected and our pond is clear and pretty again. These are the same gardens that spawned the idea in the first place but recently Mimi has been doing her research on plants that can live in the water. Lotus, water Lillie’s, Cannas, Iris and a host of plants that we don’t know much about are about to become a part of our garden life. We have opened up a new section of our property that is boggy and shady that we are excited about. This area will fit right into our plans to begin learning about the world of aquatics. It’s exciting to think about the years it will give us to do some R and D so we can begin offering the plants and some knowledge to our customers who are interested in this fascinating area of gardening.
We knew the water gardens in Denver would speed up our process of learning technics of anchoring the plants to the bottom of the pond, keeping the plants alive in the winter and things we don’t even know that we don’t even know. We spent most of the day there and had a great lunch in the middle of the gardens. We were the nerds with a notebook, figuring out how to start and questions to find the answers to when we get home. We were also inspired to add some more flower beds around the nursery so we and customers can see bedding plants grown to full size in the ground so we can all see what a full grown version of that baby plant that we offer at our garden center. I want to plant vines around the nursery so everyone can see what vines can do for a place. That we will start on as soon as we get home. The last part of the day was about getting some groceries to stock our rental house and get moved in. The place is gorgeous with a wonderful view of mountains all around from the porches and the hot tub. We are spending the last hours of this day hanging around with some music on and feeling the temperatures drop enough to put on some sleeves while the water heats up. This is shaping up to be one of our favorites. We will head out to some where every day but we will wind up back here every night. It’s amazing how fast we can slip into relax mode when it’s time to, I think it was high time for a break.
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