Travelogs

Yesterday was our 32nd wedding anniversary, so Carol and I took the puppies up to Woodmen Kennel on Wednesday and then blasted over Ute Pass to one of our favorite places: Mt. Princeton Hot Springs Resort. It's a little south of Buena Vista, Colorado, and only 110 miles from our front door. I reported on it briefly back in 2004, but the resort has changed hands in the past four years and the new owners are putting a lot of work and money into it. Brand new log cabins are going up on both sides of Chalk Creek, and there's a pavilion for weddings and other events. All that being the case, it's no longer the cheap date it was in 2004, but I definitely feel it's still worth the price. (~$120/night in the off season, including October.)

The gimmick is that by the side of the creek, water comes bubbling up from parts unknown at 133° F. By judiciously mixing the hot springs water with filtered creek water (which is Rocky Mountain snowmelt and generally in the mid-high 40s) they keep two huge pools steaming away at human-tolerable temps. The large pool (at left in the photo above) is a trifling 95°. The small pool is kept at 104° and is basically a 35' by 15' hot tub. If that's not hot enough for ya, there's a steam room in the middle. The resort's most unique gimmick is the creek pools: Because the water comes up from the ground on one bank of the creek, the resort has artfully arranged boulders on the creekbed so that the hot water mixes dynamically with water from the creek, keeping the temps generally in the 102° vicinity. And they're adjustable: If you want a cooler pool, you shove a boulder a little to let more of the creek in. If you want a hotter pool, you put small stones and creekbed sand in the cracks to keep more of the creek water out. Part of the fun is that the seep rate changes from second to second, so now and then you get a burst of hot water or ice water and there's no way to know what's coming. The brave are regularly observed to hop from the hot pools right into Chalk Creek. They always seem to sound European when they yelp. You'd think that they don't have cold rivers in Germany or something.

The resort is open year-round, irrespective of temperature. (They do close when snow makes the county road impassable.) This includes the creek pools. We want to go back in January to see how much steam comes off the 104° pool, and whether the Europeans are still hopping into the creek.

The resort uses the hot water for everything. They have to; every well on the property brings up hot water, though not all of it is at 133°. The rooms are heated with hot springs water. There are little radiator/fan things in the walls and if you want heat, you turn on the fan. If you don't want heat you get some anyway; there are pipes everywhere full of 133° water. The solution: Open the windows. The toilets flush with hot springs water. Think about it. (And don't flush while sitting down…) The faucets run hot springs water from both the hot and cold spigots, but the water going to the cold spigot runs through pipes somewhere that bleed some of the heat off, probably into the creek. The downside there is that the longer you run the cold water, the hotter it gets. Showers are of necessity quick.

The food is good, and the restaurant plays some satellite channel that specializes in top 40 songs from the 80s, everything from Roseann Cash to Dire Straits. Lots of Dire Straits. Out by the hot pools, they play jazz banjo improv, or else whatever the crew on duty happens to like. It was tough to predict, but after a couple of days, I realized that I will take jazz banjo over jazz sax six throws out of four.

Yesterday morning we took the road west, up into the mountains, to see the fall colors. We chose wisely: The colors were at their peak, and were breathtaking. You could trace the paths that water takes flowing down the mountains by the bands of yellow aspen groves. After the first hour or two, I was very glad I have a 2GB SD card in my camera.

At the end of the “good” dirt road pavement was the famous Colorado sort-of-a-ghost-town, St. Elmo. The opening of the central Colorado mineral district in the early 1880s made St. Elmo happen, and the Denver, South Park, and Pacific narrow-gauge railroad kept the supplies flowing in and the ore flowing out for almost forty years. St. Elmo is not quite dead; people still live in some of the ancient buildings, which are painstakingly kept looking ramshackle because it's what people expect, even though the old photographs make the town look far better, and almost sprightly. Land there is mind-bogglingly expensive, and encumbered by deed restrictions that require that your buildings look “historically accurate,” which as best I can tell means looking like they're about to fall over. Maybe living at 10,000 feet will do that to you.

The old DSP&P right of way is still there and can be traced, and parts of it are now a hiking trail. I tried to climb a 100-foot embankment up to the trackbed from one of the small lakes that the Forest Service maintains along Chalk Creek, but 10,000 feet will do other things to you as well, especially when you're 56. Note that it didn't stop me; it just made me angry, and I will return and get up to the alignment at some point in the future.

In summary: Our trip was a complete success. Carol and I allowed ourselves the privilege of staying in bed and cuddling until 8:00AM—which is easier when Aero hasn't been throwing himself bodily against the walls of his kennel to get our attention since 6:15. We took care to remember not only why we fell in love but why we stayed in love all these years: We continue to look at the world like a couple of wide-eyed kids, practicing the art of being delighted. Taking delight in one another makes it easier to take delight in the world, and vise versa. (Being jaded is for statues.) 32 years? Heh. We're just getting into second gear!

At Denvention 3, at the Denver Convention Center. I used to hit just about every worldcon or NASFIC, but my life got a lot more complicated in the mid-80s, and the energy I used to put into writing SF began to go into computer books. Then when Keith and I kicked off our own publishing company, yikes! So I haven't been to a Worldcon in 8 years, and haven't been to a con at all since the 2005 Windycon when ISFiC Press launched The Cunning Blood.

It was nice to be back, and it took me awhile to discern why: This is a Worldcon of Unusual Size, which is to say, small enough not to exhaust me with its hugeness, but still big enough to draw old friends from the far corners of the country into a single graspable space. Why it wasn't more popular is a puzzle; Denver is a Huge City of Unusual Size (HCUS) too, small enough to not overwhelm but large enough to be quirky and interesting. It's also one of the cleanest and most beatiful huge cities in the US, followed by Seattle and then (perhaps) Chicago, both of which suffer incresingly from size and congestion. I'm getting to be more of a small-town guy as I get older, and in my perspective even Denver is a shade big for permanent residence, but if somebody bombed Colorado Springs, I'd probably just scoot up I-25 and stay here. (Pete Albrecht continues to worry about us moving to Nebraska, but I've grown mighty used to dry climates since I first discovered them in 1987.)

I got here Thursday about suppertime and checked into the Westin Tabor Center, which has great beds and showers but lousy soundproofing, and perhaps the noisiest plumbing of any major hotel I've ever visited. This morning I awoke to a sequence of three showers, one to either side of me and then another above me. I know, I know, I'm an Insomniac of Unusual Sensitivity (IUS) and waking me up doesn't take much. The toilet tank refilling made a sound that should be sampled for a film involving spacecraft of unusual propulsion systems (SUPS) which is odd, considering how gutless the low-flow flush process itself proved to be.

But the first item on the agenda was the Flying Pen Press premiere party over at the Tattered Cover Bookstore, at which Jim Strickland would be reading briefly from his second novel, Irreconcilable Differerences. The book is terrific and I'll post a detailed review here shortly; I want to read it again now that I have it in paper. But it may establish a brand-new subsubgenre that I might as well call “cyberbilly,” which is to say, cyberpunk in the small-town American heartland. Jim reads fiction well for an audience, and while most of the other books presented left me cold, I was left giggling by a short snippet read from David Boop's new book, She Murdered Me wth Science, which, well, defies description. David has done time as a stand-up comic and it shows, and the event as a whole reminded me that I've read my own work in front of an audience precisely once, and need to practice a little.

Yesterday morning I finally got down to the convention proper, and started running into people almost immediately; first Eric Bowersox, then Alex and Phyllis Eisenstein, then Bonnie Jones, Kelley Higgins, and (later) Bill Higgins. I had lunch with Mike and Alice Bentley, and eventually collided with Jim Strickland and his wife Marcia Bednarcyk. We camped out on one of the nice sofas set near the autographing tables and ended up spending the rest of the afternoon there, hashing out the issues of how the SF publishing business is changing, and how writers of insufficient reputation (RIR) can take advantage of the changes we're seeing. “Write more!” was Eric's completely incontestable answer (directed primarily at me), but tonnage, while important, is not sufficient. The issue remains open, but I got some great insights from both Marcia and Alice Bentley, who works part-time for Studio Foglio and pays attention to other small and very small press operations in this industry. There may not in fact be a general solution to the problem, but being more visible among the people who read your kind of material is something that kept coming up. This (obviously) leaves less time for actually writing it, especially for guys like me with Unusual Sleep Requirements (USR) but as with almost any system of many equations, there's a sweet spot on the curve somewhere. The main challenge is just finding it.

I'm about to go back over there and see what else may be going on. I have a couple of sessions marked with stickies in the nicely-implemented pocket program, but I will be heading home again later this afternoon. A little con goes a long way with me, but as Worldcons go, I have so far enjoyed this one a great deal.

Well, we're not hobbits but we're back—having returned late yesterday afternoon, a whole week later than we thought we would, but we just didn't get as much done out in Chicago as we had to in the four weeks we'd allowed. The trip was hot, but dry; we saw no rain all the way across a route we now would know blindfolded. The weather broke a little by the time we got to Ogallala, and so we decided to take a day to recuperate on the clean sand shores of Lake McConaughy. It was a little hotter than I'd like, but the water in the shallows of the south shore was 83°, and even out up to my neck my little Kodak photography thermometer showed 74° down off my right hip.

We started out on the north shore, but the flies were out in force, and after less than an hour we packed the puppies and the chairs back into the car and drove around to the south shore. We stayed there most of the rest of the day. I flew my supposedly cranky parafoil kite, but in the strong breeze off the lake it performed flawlessly, almost skyhook-style, sitting stock still at 200' while pulling my 80-pound test line so hard the line was humming loud enough to hear above the racket from the ubiquitous jet skis. Carol and I swam while QBit and Aero watched, distressed, from the shore. They were willing to frolic in the water if we frolicked with them, but when we went out to deeper water for some simple swimming, they sat on the sand, dodged waves, and whimpered.

While filling up at the local Shell station for the last stretch home, I spotted the item at left used as a traffic barrier. It was about waist high. I've seen these before, mostly larger and piled up on shorelines as breakwaters, but I've never been able to determine what they're properly called. They're not exactly caltrops (they have two points too many) but they're clearly related, at least structurally.

There was high overcast our last day on the road, and even though the temps were in the mid-90s, the lack of glare made the driving a great deal easier. We got back just in time to dinner with Laurraine Tutihasi and her husband Mike Weasner, who were on their way to Worldcon in Denver from Tucson. We knew Laurraine from our Rochester NY days 25+ years ago, and Mike is the Web's leading authority on Meade ETX telescopes.

About an hour after parting with Laurraine and Mike, a carload of friends also on their way to Worldcon arrived, this time from Chicago, to spend the night and then head up to set up Steve Salaba's huckster table early this morning. Now, I'm a black belt car packer, but I have met my match, and then some: There wasn't a wasted cubic centimeter in that minivan. There was just enough room in the back seat for one person, blocked in on all sides by coolers and shelves and boxes of plush puppets and stuffed animals. (Note the “Bambi butt” that worked its way out of an overstuffed box toward the left.) It's not how I would have chosen to travel to Worldcon, but Steve, Bonnie (shown), and Eloise are all Worldcon pros from way back, and rotated positions in the vehicle often enough so the person in back didn't get suicidal.

We were away from Colorado Springs during the worst heat spell in several years, and when we got in the front door the temperature was 85 degrees, and the air rich with plasticisers and solvents still being driven from the woodwork. It was hot for awhile while we cranked open every window to get some less toxic air through the place, but it had to be done. I'll willingly admit that I'm still exhausted from our trip, but we're recuperating, and one more good night's sleep should do it. Then, probably Thursday morning, we're off to Worldcon ourselves, if not for the whole stretch then at least long enough to see Nancy Kress again (along with numerous other friends we used to see every Worldcon) and get a sense for what the SF convention scene is like these days. We used to go to Worldcon almost every year, but eventually real life intervened. I have a soft spot for Denver Worldcons; at Denvention 2 in 1981 I had two stories on the Hugo ballot. I lost, of course, but wow: What a rush that was!

It really is Nebraska. It just feels like Hell. As we pulled into North Platte about an hour ago, the 4Runner's outside thermometer read 108°. And outside, well, we're reminded of a mild summer's day in Scottsdale, except with three times the humidity. In short, uggh.

We're on our way back to Colorado Springs from almost five weeks in Chicago. We got our new niece Juliana baptized and almost everything else on our substantial do-it list done, but it took more time and energy than we thought.

Just like, well, always.

We spent last night in Newton, Iowa, the former home of Maytag, back when there still was a Maytag. The hotel we stayed in was awful enough that I will issue an all-points avoidance notice: Whatever else you may do to abuse your body, mind, or soul, do not stay at the Newton, Iowa Holiday Inn Express on 4th Street. Unless, of course, you wish to confront:

• Mold growing on the walls. Not the bathroom walls, either. The walls in the main room.
• A hole in the ceiling. It was too dark to see where it went, but it was about 1 1/2″ in diameter and looked like it had been poked with a piece of pipe. (This makes you wonder what the ceiling was made out of.)
• Wireless Internet that did not work, would not connect, and kept giving me weird error messages. At least it was free.
• Carpeting that smelled like dead fish or ocean bilge. Or both.
• Stale Raisin Bran at the breakfast bar.
• Coffee (again, at the breakfast bar) so bad I couldn't force a second cup down.

You've been warned.

Now, we like Nebraska and have been here a lot. However, there is a local weirdness I'm seeing that I don't entirely understand: Mid-grade gas is cheaper than regular. Gas is generally a bargain here, especially compared to Illinois. Why Plus should be 15c a gallon cheaper than the low-octane mix remains a puzzle.

We're going to stop at Lake McConaughy tomorrow morning (it's about fifty miles west along I-80) but if the heat remains as bad as it was today, we may dunk and run the final 275 miles to the Springs rather than spend the day. There's no shade there, and at some point I just can't deal with long periods in that kind of heat, lake or no lake. We won't know until we get there. I'll keep you posted.

We're at the Chula Vista Resort in the Wisconsin Dells for a short family vacation, and I think I've identified the first significant cultural contribution of the 21st century: the large-scale water park. I'm not talking about a pool with a single slide, or even two slides. I'm talking about a fifteen-acre indoor/outdoor complex with twelve separate water slides, some easily fifty feet high, with coils of people pipes that go outside the building and then come in again, some in several different loops. One slide even has a Men In Black 2 style “flusher” at the end. There is a sort of aquatic roller-coaster-in-a-garden-hose, and a short, simple flume that pretty much drops you vertically for about thirty feet. I looked around, and I boggled—but then I started having fun.

It's a species of fun that simply didn't exist when I was a kid. We were delirious to have a simple swimming pool or even a muddy lake to paddle around in. I think I frst saw a water slide when I was thirty-five. And I have never seen anything even remotely like this. There is constant motion (much of it from incalculable numbers of eight-year-olds) and water pouring, squirting, and spraying everywhere, in every direction at once. Buckets of many sizes, from a gallon or two up to a multihundred something the size of a hot tub, slowly fill while on pivots, and when the buckets fill, they tip over and dump their loads on anyone who happens to be below. There's a zero-depth baby pool, a one-foot deep toddler pool, a four-foot-deep activity pool for preteens, a hot tub for exhausted old guys, and a very interesting thing called a “lazy river,” which is a linear pool about two feet deep and eight wide, propelled into slow motion by angled jets in the walls. You grab an inner tube as one drifts by, and just lie on your back and follow the flow around the periphery of the complex. Carol very bravely tried every single water slide in the place, spurred on by our strapping twentysomething nephews and their svelte, althletic girlfriends. I did the bunny slides and the “croc walk,” which is a pool across which you go by hanging from a suspended net while stepping on floating faux alligator body sections. I myself was never one for thrill rides, and I deeply admire my beautiful wife for being wiling to shoot through pipes at thirty miles an hour.

One fascinating thing about our Fourth of July day at the water park was how international it all was. We had chairs next to a group of people speaking a Slavic language (Russian? I can't tell) and Carol's mom heard more than one group speaking Polish. A pair of guys were speaking French on the elevator with us, and I know enough German to identify it when I hear it. Lots of Spanish, and possibly Portuguese. Many Asian families were there, including one whom I suspect were Phillipinos speaking Tagalog. A group of young Black folks were in the hot tub with us for awhile, speaking a language that was like nothing I had ever heard. Clearly, the Wisconsin Dells is a global draw, which I found interesting, since when last I looked the Dells were kind of like Las Vegas without hookers. On the other hand, the last time I looked was in 1961, and the really big thrill was riding an Army-surplus amphibious truck on now-defunct Lake Delton. (The Delton vista was a little surreal: acres of mud, sand, and century-old tree stumps where Tommy Bartlett's skiers used to roam.) But it makes sense: The States is a cheap date these days, and all those good people from overseas were throwing cubic meters of money into the local economy.

We spent the evening at a local park, tossing a frisbee around while waiting for a pretty spectacular fireworks display. We saluted the birth of the American idea, which has seen better and worse over the years. We survived the Civil War. We survived the Depression. We will survive $5 gasoline.

The American idea is not over. It has not failed. It has not even fully matured. I'm not, in fact, sure that anyone entirely understands it—but I will celebrate it, for what has been and for what is yet to be, now and forever, amen.

I generally don't go a whole week without posting here, but Carol and I began our summer trek out to Chicago this past Friday, and like a loon I left my Web presence thumb drive in my keyboard groove in Colorado. I have my backups with me, but they do not include the longish entry I prepared on the 26th, which you now won't see until I get back home.

Anyway. We're here again, in the land of Green River soda and two-section concrete basement washtubs. White Hen Pantry has been engulfed and devoured by Southland's 7-Eleven, but miraculously, the legendary White Hen coffee bar is still there in the converted stores and still good. The weather was fantastic on our leisurely three-days-and-two-nights journey; in fact, we did not encounter any rain until we were through Marengo, Illinois and only twenty minutes from Crystal Lake.

We drove from Colorado Springs to Kearney, Nebraska our first day out, and took a couple of hours to sneak up to Lake McConaughy and see how it's faring. The lake has been greatly diminished by a near seven-year drought, but this spring the rains started returning to western Nebraska, and the lake now has six feet of depth it didn't have last year. The water was still coldish: 69° on the white-sand north shore, and 74° on the brown-sand south shore (above), where northerly winds have apparently been blowing the warmer surface layer for some weeks. It was still as clear and clean as we remember, and we're planning on stopping for the night in Ogalallah on the way back for a little quality beach time. QBit and Aero both wanted to jump in, but since we still had 150 miles to go on Friday and didn't want to spend all of it in a car full of wet-dog smell, Carol kept them on a short leash and dried their feet before we loaded up and went on.

We spent our second night in Newton, Iowa, best known for being the home of the Maytag Corporation and its bored repairmen, at least until Whirlpool acquired them and shut the company down last year. Newton is one of those “pretty-how” towns that e.e. cummings used to write about, with a real Midwestern town square surrounding the 1911 stone courthouse and Jasper County offices. With dirt-cheap housing, near-zero crime, and lots of office and manufacturing space opening up, you'd think some forward-looking high-tech entrepreneur would begin building routers or laptops or something in the old Maytag space. I can't figure it—oh wait, forgot, there's no Thai restaurants there. Damn. (But there are 100 women for every 87 men. C'mon, guys. You can always truck in the khao pad.)

Sunday was my 56th birthday, and we took a little time out to visit the Amana Colonies, and had lunch at Henry's Village Market in Homestead. Andrew, the owner, made us up some ham sandwiches on bread baked right there, and partway through had to run out to the garden to pick some more lettuce. We watched for flood damage in eastern Iowa, but apart from a submerged park along the Cedar River near Iowa City, we saw nothing we could unambiguously ascribe to the recent torrential rains.

So we're here, and will visit with friends and family and see our new niece Juliana Roper baptized. I hope to get some writing done here at the condo, and will try to keep up with Contra as time allows.