Author: danleeth

Dianne must have had fat pinkies when we married nearly 39+ years ago.  Now that she’s matured, her fingers have apparently shrunk.  Her Hopi-crafted silver wedding band became so loose, it could slip off while she simply washed her hands.

That’s what happened at a campground on the Gaspe Peninsula in French Canada.  Naturally, the sink she was using did not have a grid to keep falling rings from dropping down the drainpipe.  A young man from the camp office worked on the drainpipe for over an hour before finally succeeding in removing the P-trap and retrieving the ring.

In America, they would have closed down the ladies’ shower/restroom while the man worked inside.  But this was French Canada.  None of the female campers seemed the least bit concerned that there was an adult male working in the female restroom.

Now, one would think that dropping the ring down the drain would be a fair warning for us to either get it resized or at least feed Dianne more finger-fattening food.  We didn’t do either.

Last winter we camped for two nights in a yurt in the mountains west of Golden, Colorado.  On our layover day, we went for a hike over the snowy terrain.  Somewhere along the way, Dianne took off her gloves and the ring came off, too.  It would have been tough to find in the snow if she’d immediately realized it was gone, but she didn’t.

Sometime in the middle of the night, my lovely wife realized that her ring finger was ringless.  We searched the yurt and the park restroom in the hopes she had just taken it off and set it down somewhere.  No such luck. 

It would have been futile to try to find a tiny ring somewhere along a five-mile, snow-plastered trail.  That left us with two choices.  Get a divorce or buy a new ring.  Dianne chose the latter, it being the lesser expensive option.

With Covid shutting down the Hopi reservation, we would have to wait.  Our opportunity for ring replacement came in late June when the reservation partially reopened.  Dianne contacted a Hopi silver-craftsman and commissioned him to craft a ring with a design matching mine.  Rather than having the ring mailed to us, we agreed to pick it up at his shop in Second Mesa, Arizona.

By the shortest route, Second Mesa is a 1,265-mile roundtrip drive from our home in Aurora.  Being the travelers that we are, we chose to make it a four-night journey.  Instead of camping, it would be a road trip with us dining on local fare in non-chain restaurants and bunking down in classic motels/hotels with character. 

I’m excited. It’s time to let the tires roll.

Our route to the ring would be a four-state loop through the mountains and deserts of the Four Corners region of the American Southwest.  The first stint involved crossing the Front Range over Kenosha Pass across South Park and on to the Arkansas River Valley. 

Doing the local food thing, we stopped for Mexican food in Del Norte.  Then it was over Wolf Creek Pass on U.S. 160, which some call the North Texas Scenic Byway.  Out here, one typically sees more Texas license plates than Colorado ones.

Our first motel stop was the High Country Lodge located a few miles east of Pagosa Springs, Colorado.  We did a brief tour of the property years ago when I was researching lodging options for a magazine article.  This time, we would actually stay.

The wood-paneled, two-story lodge sits in the woods not far off the highway.  Rooms are comfortable and quiet.  Out back sits a deck with a trio of hot tubs, each of which can be reserved for private use. 

Inside, there’s a seating area for the free hot breakfast and a small bar, with Mona, the lodge owner, serving as bar tender.  Her margaritas (two ounces of Cuervo 1800 and one ounce of orange brandy combined with a bottled mix of key lime and grapefruit juice) are outstanding.

Next door to the lodge sits the Old Miner’s Steak and Chophouse.  We were told that they require advance reservations for dinner.  A fellow lodge guest without dining reservations did go over and ate at their bar, but we chose otherwise.

Still stuffed from lunch, we just stayed in our room and ate a bag of Smart Food popcorn while watching a Hallmark Channel chick-flick (cute girl falls in love with studly guy, screws up, gets rejected, but then gets the guy back for a happy ending).

After our free breakfast the next morning, we hit the road heading for Durango and on to Utah.  In Cortez, we faced a choice.  We could go straight and follow a county road along McElmo Creek to Aneth, Utah or we could take the longer way and follow U.S. and state highways.  Not knowing if the McElmo route was paved all the way, we opted for the longer route.  Our little Mazda is not a dirt-road car.

From Aneth, we headed onward to Bluff where we stopped for ice cream cones at Bluff Fort, an LDS church-run outpost/museum honoring the founders of this little, environmentalist-friendly town along the San Juan River.  We continued west to Mexican Hat where the highway crosses the river.  Our motel, the San Juan Inn sits next to the bridge on the cliffs above the river.

While we’ve only stayed at the Inn once before, we’ve stopped here for food many times.  Their restaurant serves one of the best Navajo tacos we’ve found this side of the reservation.  For the uninitiated, let me explain that a Navajo taco is a flat sheet of fry bread covered with ground beef, pinto beans, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese and other goodies.  I have to say the ones we had on this trip didn’t seem as good as what we’d had before, but the beer was better.

Run by members of the alcohol-abstaining LDS church, the state of Utah has had some of the most restrictive liquor laws around.  One of them was that all beer sold in grocery stores and served at normal restaurants could contain no more than 3.2 percent alcohol by weight.  That’s four percent alcohol by volume (the measuring system used by the rest of the world), which is less than Coors Light.

Dianne is a notorious label reader.  No product in the grocery store reaches her cart without her reading the package’s label in its entirety.  As we were tasting our tacos, she read the label on her beer. 

“Five percent ABV,” it said.  Mine said the same. 

When asked, our waitress said that last year, the legislature changed the rule to now allow real beer (5% ABV maximum) to be sold and served.  To make up for the increase on the beer side, they lowered the threshold for DUI to 0.06% BAC (the rest of the country is 0.08%).  Good ol’ Utah.

While the room was comfortable, what we liked about the place was the abundance of places to sit outside and admire the environment.  With glasses of wine in hand, we watched the setting sun light up the sky, saw a heron swoop overhead and perch on the motel roof and we listened to the braying of the miniature donkeys, which live along the river below.

While an American breakfast of sausage and eggs would have been more to my liking, Dianne had some leftover banana bread she wanted to eat for breakfast.  I opted for Hostess doughnuts purchased at the gas station mini mart instead.  Tanked up with fuel and sustenance, we set off across the San Juan River and onto the Navajo Reservation, passing Monument Valley along the way.

Our destination, the Hopi reservation, lies wholly within the Navajo reservation, and there are several roundabout ways to get there.  Lacking an Arizona road map (always come prepared), we looked up alternative routes on Google.  The online map showed a nice direct, reservation road that would take us directly to where we wanted to go.  We decided to check it out.

The first few miles led up past the Peabody Coal Company’s Black Mesa Mine.  It was paved and in better condition than much of I-70 in Colorado.  Thinking it would be like this the whole way, we continued onward. 

Miles inland, the pavement stopped, and gravel began.  Too far along to blindly turn around, we bit the bullet and continued onward.  In spite of being on an Indian reservation in the middle of nowhere, we amazingly maintained cell coverage and thus, Google map coverage. 

Every time we came to a junction, Dianne (a descendent of Wrong Way Corrigan) would consult Google to determine which way to go.  After a lot of dirt-road miles with a couple of wrong turns, we arrived literally right next door to the Hopi Cultural Center, our destination.

We arrived a bit earlier than planned and our silversmith-jeweler, Gerald Lomaventema, was not at his shop.  Dianne eventually reached him by phone and found out he had a function he had to attend that morning but was on his way. 

While waiting, we ordered lunch at the Cultural Center’s restaurant.  Naturally, we ordered Hopi tacos, these coming on blue corn frybread.  Much better than last night’s fare, even without any beer.

Gerald arrived and brought out the ring.  Dianne put it on and found it was a bit too big.  “I can fix that,” the craftsman promised.  “We’ll have to go to my studio, however.”

We followed him past a sign saying passage beyond was not open to non-natives and on to his house.  There in a shop the size of a double-car garage, he cut and resoldered the ring into a smaller version.  It was still too large for Dianne’s petite pinkie. 

“I can fix that,” the man said.

Gerald repeated the process about six times until the right size was obtained.  While he did this, his wife took my ring and some other Hopi jewelry Dianne brought with her and reoxidized the black and repolished the silver.  Mine came back so shiny, I could use it to reflect sunlight onto any rescue planes searching for us should we try to recross the reservation on those back-of-beyond Indian roads.  Fortunately, we had nothing but paved highways from here to our next stopover in Gallup.

A road trip these days frequently involves interstate highways, and for us, it would be nothing but divided highways to home.  We tanked up with fuel, bought a bottle of wine at Safeway, a venti of Komodo Dragon brew at Starbucks and with cruise control set for 75, we were on our way.

Speeding down I-40, we breezed into Albuquerque and turned north onto I-25 heading toward Denver.  Cruising past Santa Fe, we continued north to the turnoff for “the other Las Vegas,” the one in New Mexico.  Here we had reservations for a plaza-view room at the old Plaza Hotel. 

The room was spacious and bathroom clean and inviting.  The view overlooked Plaza Park, a grassy enclave where we were told a band would be playing later in the afternoon.  We got a recommendation for a good Mexican restaurant and decided to check out their margaritas before the music started.

One would think that in a Spanish colonial-style town of 13,000 whose downtown features art galleries, storefront lawyer offices a classic barbershop offering shaves and haircuts, an afternoon concert would feature mariachi music or maybe country western or bluegrass. 

Nope.  This afternoon’s entertainment was head-banging, ‘80s-era hard rock.  They were pretty good (loud), but let’s just say a little went a long way.  With the concert still going, we retreated to the Mexican restaurant for dinner.

In a state, whose official state question is “¿red or green?” (referring to flavor of the chiles), I knew I wasn’t going to stoop down to ordering a good ol’ American breakfast the next morning.  Following the recommendation of the front desk clerk, we walked to a little mom ‘n’ pop Mexican restaurant. 

While I’m downing a breakfast burrito, the owner comes by, introduces himself and over a few minutes of quiet conversation, reveals a few tidbits of his life story.

Other than the challenge of trying to find an empty bay at a gas station in Raton (we’d like to welcome all of you Colorado-bound Texans), it was an easy drive from here to home.

Compared to camping, road trips offer numerous advantages.  Driving a small, nimble, pavement-hugging car is more fun than cruising in a three-ton truck pulling a three-ton trailer.  I can just put the car in cruise control and actually pass other vehicles on the highway, such as slow-moving trucks pulling trailers.

We can easily stop at any roadside attraction of interest along the way, we burn far, far less fuel (35 mph vs 8 mph) getting there.  On longer trips, the gas savings can be enough to cover the cost difference between a campground site and a cheap, Super 8-quality motel room.

It takes minutes to check into a motel and minutes to check out.  Even if we remain hooked up in a pull-through campsite, it typically takes us an hour or more to set up or take down.

On a car trip, we often have a choice of lodging options ranging from rooms in cheap, independent motels to suites in super luxurious properties. 

Best of all (from my wife’s point of view), on a road trip, Dianne doesn’t have to cook.  Instead, we can sample interesting local cuisine prepared by knowledgeable chefs.  Or we can eat at Denny’s.

Maybe I’ve been camping too long, but with all the advantages of road trips, I found our ring road trip a bit disappointing.

With camping, even in the most crowded RV parks, we have quick access to the outdoors.  We can sit outside and feel the breeze, listen to the birds, swat the mosquitoes, admire the sunset and gaze at the stars.  Most motels are places built for staying indoors.

We can walk around the campground and chat with fellow campers.  Few folks say more than “hi” to fellow patrons at a motel, but at a campground, folks are generally more than willing to talk to strangers.

Having gone through a long year of Covid concerns, when camping we enjoy a feeling of safety when eating and sleeping in familiar quarters shared with no one else. 

Best of all (from my point of view), my wife (an excellent chef) cooks our camping meals with food purchased in grocery stores. 

It’s far cheaper than restaurant food, usually healthier (I gained three pounds on our ring trip), and I don’t have to leave a tip.