Mixed bag!

After chemo last week, no. 5, Carol and I took off on a road trip to New Mexico. We were to meet her sisters, the McGuire sisters, in Santa Fe for 4 days over the balloon festival. We picked a beautiful time of the year to travel, the leaves were changing color and the colors were so rich.

We discovered that by driving down the eastern side of Colorado we could miss the traffic of the Fort Collins, Denver and Colorado Springs corridor. We drove down highway 71 and saw maybe one car per mile. Much nicer than all that traffic!!! Although, there was a constant fight with the GPS lady, she must be paid by the Interstate system, as she was constantly trying to redirect us to the Interstate. But we managed to fight her off.

On our arrival in Albuquerque we had drinks with Linda and Andrew Yianakkis. Carol was a good sport and listened while we talked mostly about martial arts history and culture. It must have been a good discussion as 2 ½ hours went by in the blink of an eye. Great seeing you guys again.

The next morning I woke up with a very upset stomach. I wasn't supposed to get nausea from the Pemitrexid! I spent Thursday in bed, Friday and Saturday also. The girls had a great time eating out at all of their favorite places (El Pinto, La Fonda, Tomacita's), shopping and seeing the sights. Saturday morning they got up early and went out and watched the balloon festival, I relocated to the couch and watched the balloons on TV.

Sunday I felt better, but also felt like I had caught a cold. I had been so ill, that I had a hard time sorting out the symptoms, beyond upset stomach. I was coughing a lot in the morning and having a hard time catching my breath after taking a shower. Carol was constantly checking my temperature, it was above normal, but did not meet the requirements to head to the emergency room.

We checked out of the condo on Sunday morning and headed for Colorado, our goal was to look at some mining and railroad history. We stopped in Chama for lunch, Carol had some Mexican food, said it was the best of the trip. I had a hamburger. We spent the night in Durango.

I was up most of the night coughing so was not interested in taking a train ride the next morning, “the Durango-Silverton Railroad” has an all day trip through the mountains – been on my bucket list for many years. The front at the hotel told us not to wear white as you will come back gray from smoke... good thing we didn't make it to “all aboard”, my lungs wouldn't have made it.

We hung around for a while and toured the train museum and then decided to head for Cripple Creek another mining town and the site of the Molly Kathleen Mine. On the way we got caught in a snowstorm, there was about 4 inches of snow. As we came through the pass we came across tractor trailers jack knifed in the road, cars in the ditch, a horse trailer on it's side, it was a mess. We had a lane through the mess, the road way was slippery, everyone was going 5 miles an hour when they were moving, it took us the better part of two hours to move 5 miles.

We decided to give the highway department some time to clean the roads, we stopped in Salida for the night.

The following morning we woke up to chilly, bright sunshiny day. We continued our trip to Cripple Creek. We stopped first at the Molly Kathleen Mine and rode the skip 1,000 feet down into the mine and spent an hour walking through the mine with a guide. Fascinating slice of history! We were surprised when the guide told us that the mine was the number 3 attraction in Colorado. Then we looked around the Heritage Center and got another big slice of history from the area.

From there we drove to Leadville for some more history. We stayed in an old hotel, recently refurbished, in the down town area. Lot of antiques. The museum that we wanted to see was closed. It was getting late in the season and a lot of places were closed. As I was still feeling a bit under the weather we decided to call it quits and head for home. We angled for our new favorite highway, #71, through Colorado and by late evening we were home.

Home, sweet, home.