Phoenix is hot. I mean, yes, it’s Phoenix, but we’ve been having record high temperatures since the Corona Apocalypse started. For example, October started out in the neighborhood of 110 degrees and is still going strong. Thankfully, our scheduled vacation dates have finally arrived.
We decided to go to Durango, Colorado, where the highs in the mid-eighties would be a welcome break from the sweltering heat. Knowing we had a full day of travel in the car ahead of us, my husband and I kept our morning gym ritual to get the blood flowing. With bags pre-packed, all we had to do was throw the children in the car: one human, two canines.
The canines (rottweilers Remus and Chloe) knew something was up and were very excited to get in the car. Little did they know that they were going to spend a few days at Grandma and Grandpa’s house without their humans. The three-hour trip up the mountain to my in-laws’ house flew by like four hours as the dogs – not yet two years old – are still puppies…large, lanky, uncoordinated, and excitable puppies who don’t travel particularly well and still think they are lap dogs. Remus kept trying to scoot into the front seat and, more specifically, into my husband’s lap, who, by the way, was driving. Chloe sat meekly in the cargo area and threw up twice. As a cop, my husband, Nik, has dealt with decomposing bodies, gory wounds, and drunks with incontinence, among other things. However, since vomit is the only bodily fluid he cannot tolerate, I got to clean it up. No worries, though – we came prepared with napkins, rags, baby wipes, and plastic bags.
Free of the fur-babies, the rest of the trip was much calmer, but with frequent reminders to my nine-year-old daughter, Zoe, who also gets car sick, to take breaks from watching Netflix and let us know if she started feeling sick. The odds were in our favor.
We got in to Durango late and, with the one-hour time difference, it felt like the world was closing early. I found a pizza place that delivered and was told we were out of their delivery jurisdiction, but was given the number to their sister store. No problem. I called the sister store, gave the address, placed the order, and gave them my payment information, being assured that my order would arrive in about 45 minutes. Awesome.
Ten minutes later I got a call from an employee at the first store apologizing for the mix-up and advising that they could deliver to my location. I told the man that I had already placed an order with the second store and that they were taking care of me. Not to worry. I almost had a second thought about it, but I had a video call about to start, so I put it out of my mind. Nearly an hour later, once my video call was over, I saw that it was five minutes to closing time and our food still hadn’t gotten delivered. I called the second store (where I placed the order) and, after a little bit of calling around, found out that the delivery driver had told the person who took my information, to cancel my order because the other store was supposed to process it; hence why I received the phone call from the gentleman at the first store, but I was not informed that the store where I placed my order had cancelled it. The lady I spoke with was actually very nice and apologetic and even offered me a gift card for the following day. I told her I understood and that sometimes mix-ups happen. A little disappointed and more than a bit hungry, we drove to the Sonic down the street and devoured half our meal before we returned to the parking lot.
I awoke with a crick in my neck as the hotel pillows were much too stuffed for my liking, but breakfast is my favorite meal of the day and the first stop on the day’s activities was a sit-down breakfast at the homestyle diner next to our hotel. When I was very young, I remember going to brunch with my grandparents after church on Sundays. My grandpa, who was my “twin” since I was born on his birthday, had always let me stack the little rectangle jelly packets while we waited for our food. He also let me open one and eat the contents straight out of the packet with a spoon. This diner had those same Smucker’s jelly packets and my daughter, Zoe, used her spoon to scoop out strawberry jelly and eat it straight from the packet…just like I had shown her. Some family traditions, however small, can bring a smile to your face after decades. While she didn’t eat more than a bite of her scrambled eggs (they looked too weird all rolled together), my daughter informed me that her biscuits and gravy (without sausage) was “very delicious.”
Zoe’s favorite animals are horses, so we found a ranch that could fit us into a two-hour trail ride that same day. Yes, we have those in Arizona, but not with the Colorado scenery – which was filled with trees of different colored leaves – and, more importantly, weather that didn’t cook you like a rotisserie in ten minutes. We had a small group, with only one other couple on our ride. I have been on a horse maybe a dozen times in my life. I know some very basic things…like you always mount from the left, you aren’t supposed to walk directly behind a horse unless you want a horse-shoe shaped Lucky Charm permanently imprinted on your forehead, you aren’t supposed to hold on to the pommel, and you generally should leave them well enough alone. Essentially, I know that I don’t know a whole helluvalot about horses.
I did, however, know slightly more than a small family of other city slickers that (thankfully) were in a different trail ride group. Everything about them screamed drama and our trail staff seemed out of patience with them before we even received our briefing. One of our trail guides told me she was “all peopled out.” An introvert myself, I could totally relate. A couple of the younger riders from the other group panicked and squealed when the horses started meandering a few feet while we were lining up. The most entertaining piece of that hullabaloo was when the guide threw her arms up and mocked screamed “Oh, my God!” before following it with “Why are you freaking out? Don’t you realize you’re on a live animal with a mind of its own?” I could see Nik’s shoulders shaking with laughter; as a matter of fact, he does not like riding horses for precisely that same reason – they have minds of their own – and he would much prefer a motorcycle that is under his complete control.
Our ride was very pleasant and peaceful, accented with a few deer sightings and a couple of steep switchbacks, which, I’m not gonna lie, caused me to tense up and grab the pommel and make sure I was leaning back when we went downhill and forward when we went uphill. I also gave my horse, Roman, plenty of room in the reins to go wherever the hell he wanted to go. I knew he didn’t want to fall any more than I did, so I was content to let him do his thing since he was the expert. I did make sure I was polite and tell him “good boy” and give him occasional pats. Yes, I’m a city slicker, and, yes, I did wonder how much like Billy Crystal our guide thought us to be. Luckily, we weren’t driving cattle and I didn’t have to deliver a calf and call him Norman, although I totally would.
Perhaps my biggest blooper was after one of the times our guide stopped the convoy to help my daughter direct her horse down a steep portion of the trail (apparently, he wanted to go on the shorter, less steep trail ride). My horse tried to follow the lead horse so I told him to “heel” before realizing that was the wrong command for this particular animal and changed it to “Woah” and pulled back on the reins. I did enjoy seeing my daughter’s ear-to-ear grin when she got to trot to catch up to me whenever her horse fell behind.
After chitchatting about horses and hunting with my husband, our guide praised him with “Oh, you’re not dudes. You’re cowboys!” Despite years of helping his grandfather on a ranch and an unmistakable Arizona twang that comes out when he talks to others with a similar drawl, my husband politely declined the upgrade from “dude” to “cowboy,” insisting he did not do that kind of work anymore. Our guide did, however, seem genuinely grateful that he got to babysit our group for the trail ride instead of the other, higher-maintenance group and said as much. Incidentally, Nik is highly allergic to about a million different types of grass and animals, including cats and horses, so by the end of our ride he was breaking out in hives and afterward, we made a pitstop for some Benadryl before we headed back to Durango.
To be continued…
Original Post 10/2020
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