duck-shaped pain

Also, I was sort of bored.

The town my mom lives in is nice, but you can exhaust all the entertainment options there in one not-very-long day.

I managed to spread it all out over two and a half, so I felt pretty proud.

Saturday morning, we went to yard sales. I had more luck yesterday than I've had in awhile. I found:

• A 1940s tablecloth with weird, oddly shaped pears and melons all over it

• A cool old blue glass salt shaker

• An interesting yet unexplicable ceramic bird. It's sort of a half-rooster, half-parrot (top part of the bird looks like a rooster and the bottom part like a parrot), and it attaches to a wire hoop, so it appears to be sitting on a perch. I hung it up in the enormous plastic "tree" I found by the side of the road earlier this year, which is where something like it belongs...

• A cup with Japanese writing and cartoon characters on it

• Another stovetop espresso maker

Regarding tht last item -- I now own three stovetop espresso makers. I don't really own three of anything, other than clothes, books and CDs. I love them, though. I want many more.

I bought this one to keep down at my mom's house, since I'll be going down there one or twice a week if I start this theoretical job. My mom has many nice things; a decent coffee maker is not among them.

I have a weakness for stovetop espresso makers, anyway. My first, and favored one, is a white enamel one, apparently made sometime in the 60s. It's very shapely and pleasing to the eye, and makes good coffee. The second one is a more typical style, but rarely gets used. Someone [1] put it in the dishwasher right after I bought it with some sort of detergent that stripped the coating off the metal. Now coffee made in it tastes funny and metallic, so it's more or less useless at this point. This new one looks similar to the second one, except it's black.

After yard sales, we went out for breakfast. I really was not in the mood for the usual post-yard sale breakfast, one that completely incapacitates you after you eat it. So I put my foot down. No biscuits and gravy or green chile, not today. Wonderful meals, but I wanted something else. I was thinking muffin, but we ended up going to the local juice place.

Juice places are usually all alike, but this one was better. It served food, and all of its food, save one item (California rolls) was vegetarian. I had the breakfast burrito, which wasn't as heavy and intimidating as most [2], although I could have had the rice, beand and peanut sauce burrito or the vegetable curry bowl. It all looked pretty good, and was an interesting thing to find in a rural ranching community, to say the least.

After that, I was ready to go. But, since I still had most of the day before me, I decided to not take a direct route home.

You might remember the entry or two a few weeks back where I wrote about the town of Pea Green, Colorado and my love of it, based solely on how much I liked the name.

Pea Green is somewhat near Montrose, so I decided to go looking for it. It's not difficult to find, but finding a map that would tell me the way to get there was. I finally found one -- in the phone book. Interesting.

My mom said that while I might drive through Pea Green, I probably wouldn't know it, because there was nothing there. She was wrong. There's a sign and a store -- the Pea Green Store, which was unexpectedly wonderful.

It's pretty neat looking (I wish I had brought the camera with me, so I could put a picture up). It's in an old adobe-tyle building which had been painted white, with PEA GREEN STORE painted on it in green, friendly letters.

Of course, I stopped. I had to, and besides, I was thirsty. I went in, grabbed some water, and ran into the woman who rins the store. She was excited -- I was the first customer she'd had all day. She asked me if I was a tourist (remember, I have out-of-state plates on my car), and I told her that I'd been wanting to see Pea Green for awhile.

"So, is it everything you'd imagined?" she asked me.

"Yes!" I replied.

I got one of their Pea Green store stickers and went on my way.

The drive from there to Delta was nice and peaceful, much nicer than the usual route, especially on a sunny Saturday in July, when the roads fill up with pleasure seekers and tourists with big RVs. This was the big reason I decided to head north instead of going down to Ouray [3] as was my original plan for the day. Tiny mountain passes plus big RVs and lots of traffic = trouble.

On the route I took yesterday, I didn't see much traffic, but I did see a whole lot of corn.

When I got to Delta, I decided I didn't feel like going home yet. I looked at my map and made a split-second decision to go to...Paonia. Which is a) about 29 miles east of Delta and b) someplace I've never been before, although I went by it many times in my youth on the way to allegedly more exciting locations.

To get to Paonia, you have to drive on Colorado Highway 92 through Read, Lazear, Rogers Mesa and Hotchkiss, after which you get on Highway 133 until you get to the sign that says, Paonia: That Way. The road goes through about equal parts brown desert and green orchards.

I passed a sign on the way which said Fruit Ranch: 500 Feet. I kept thinking of the concept of fruit ranching, on what a pain it is to have to go out and round up all those free-range apricots.

I knew I was getting near Paonia when I saw an Adopt-A-Highway sign sponsored by the Friends of the High Country News. [4] The worth-rading HCN is published in Paonia, which just adds to its reputation as half ranching/mining community, half hippie enclave.

There were also many more motorcycles than usual out on the road. I kept wondering why, but didn't find out until I got to Paonia that this was the weekend of one of their annual motorcyle rallies. So the town was full of them.

It's a nice town. When I got there, I was very, very sick of driving, so I got out and walked around town for awhile. I would have had a better time if I had worn better shoes and took the cane (I forgot it in the car), but it was a good time anyway. I mostly explored the downtown area, and also looked around at some of the old houses. I left my trusty Buildings of Colorado at home, so i can't tell you much other than they were very nice and mostly Victorian.

I wanted to go see Terror Creek Winery while I was in town, but I couldn't find it, and no one I asked (they were all fellow tourists) knew how to get there. It's the highest winery in the world at 6,400 feet above sea level.

I left Paonia and headed home, retracing much of my route. But I still didn't feel like going home yet -- it was only 1 in the afternoon.

So I decided to take the long route home -- Colorado Highway 65 over the top of the Grand Mesa, the world's largest flat-topped mountain. [5]

This route takes about an hour, and climbs from about 5,300 feet above sea level to nearly 11,000 feet at Grand Mesa's "summit". The road winds through the communities of Orchard City, Eckert, Cedaredge, and finally, Mesa. It's another extremely pleasant drive, and has an official Scenic Byway designation.

My car was not particulalry thrilled by this, however. Despite getting a tune-up and new engine fans the previous day, it sort of groaned its way up the side of the mesa. Of course, I hadn't driven it at altitude for awhile, so that might be why it was having problems. [6]

Finally, I got to the top, where it was nice, cool, and mosquito-infested. I didn't get out of the car much, because I was exhausted, my leg hurt, and also because of the problematic shoes. But I did pull over once at once of the scenic overlooks at the edge of the mesa. From there you can see everything: the orchards, the desert, the Book Cliffs to the north, my town, the Colorado River, all sorts of things.

Driving down the mesa, I passed the old sledding hill, where everyone in my town used to in the winter. Someone built a house there a few years back, which I didn't know about until yesterday.

Even through I had a good time, I was very relieved to get home. I was hot, tired, sweaty and I had another huge sunburn, even though I put on generous amounts of sunscreen that morning. At least I got sunburned on the opposite shoulder of my last sunburn -- now I'm more evenly balanced.

[1] Not me.

[2] Breakfast burritos are like a showcase item for many restaurants. They go out of their way to make them as large and fully packed with stuff as possible. Enormous burritos seem to say, Look at this. Look how generous we are. We're giving you so much value for your money by stuffing this burrito with ten different ingredients. You can be assured you're getting just as much quality in every other menu item.

[3] Question #45 on the Are You A Real Coloradan? quiz is whether or not you can pronounce Ouray correctly. It's not O-ray or OO-ray, as I've heard occasionally, but it's more like YOU-ray (acceptable) or YURR-ray (more common). Now you know. Now you can fit in.

[4] Without the italics, I'm afraid.

[5] This fact is a source of much pride in my hometown, which its in its shadow. However, I've ever been able to really revel in that pride because my dad, the geologist, has always maintained that it's not true. The problem is that I've never really been able to get him to explain why it's false. He always says something like, "It's all in how you define what, exactly, a mountain is..." Which doesn't explain it to me at all.