Got up and ate breakfast and dressed for church. Could not find a Methodist church in Gunnison. Looked for others on the net but could not find one that stated what time services were, so we finally decided we would get on our way and look for a church on the way. What we didn't know was that the next 60 miles took us over Monarch pass. After driving up and down over 11,300 feet of elevation,, the Lord had both Esther and I on our knees. I drove both up and down. Brakes didn't get hot and I probably never got over 35 mph. Esther once again tempted fate,on the way up by asking me if I didn't think it was beautiful. I gladly pulled over to let her take photographs.
However coming down, she paid closer attention to how close to the edge I was and stopped talking about its beauty. At the bottom of the pass, we found our first church, but by that time services were over. We once again settled by listening to the Family Hour on radio. After the pass, we still had several miles of windy roads through the canyon. Finally we hit the flatlands of Colorado near La Junta and we both cheered when we reached the Kansas state line. We are spending the night outside of Garden City, KS at the RJ RV Campground. Thanks to good directions from the campground attendant, we made it safe and sound after a false start when we tried to use the Garmin to get us there. The Garmin would have had us stay in a nice residential neighborhood in Garden City We hope to be in Enid early tomorrow afternoon
7/13/2010
We started the morning by buying cheap diesel at 2.99 per gallon. Then we headed for home. The road was straight and there were not any mountains. Hooray!. we stopped at Bryan'ts corner for lunch beside the road and had our last meal on the road for sometime. We cheered once again when we crossed the Oklahoma state line even if the roads did get worse. As we got closer and closer to Enid we watched the price of diesel fall, from the high at 3.42 in Torrey, UT to Walmart in Enid for 2.56. After spending about 1 1/2 hours backing the 5th wheel into Esther's drive-way so we could open all the slide outs so her granddaughters could spend the night, we learned that the electrical socket she had available to hook up to was sharing the line with her air conditioner in her front room. It didn't take long to learn we weren't going to be able to keep the air in the trailer running without sacrificing the air in the house. Sorry girls, but we will have to find a time when we don't need the air for you to be able to spend the night in the trailer. . Esther took me to the Walmart It must have been close to three weeks since we had made it to a Walmart and I was really beginning to go into withdrawal. Afterwards we made it to the cheap diesel and filled the truck. Now that we had all the necessities completed, we started thinking about catching up on the journal and finishing the blog.
It was a great trip that neither of us will forget. We hit 13 National Parks in a little over 30 days which was the biggest problem. Our enthusiasm started waning somewhere around number 8. Though there aren't any we would give up, we recommend taking it a little slower and resting a lot in between so you can really enjoy them. Each has it's own special place in our hearts and we wouldn't want to have missed them. We just should have taken more time to smell the roses.
