Good to be home after 13,000-mile road trip

“S

top!” my wife, Dianne, ordered from the navigator’s seat. “I want to take a picture of the sign.”

I hit the brakes and pulled car and trailer onto the roadside gravel. Camera in hand, Dianne leaped out and fired off a halfdozen shots.

“Welcome to Colorful Colorado,” the sign read. We were back home again.

Dianne and I were returning from a 100-day road trip through Canada, camping from British Columbia to Newfoundland. While motoring 13,000-plus miles across our northern neighbor proved to be a truly enchanting experience, the journey made us appreciate just how great we have it here in Colorado.

Take our mountains for example. Escaping from Kansas on Interstate 70, we were once again thrilled to see the Front Range jutting into the sky. At this time of year, the summits glistened with fresh snow. I often wonder what early pioneers thought when they saw that wall of peaks separating them from destinations beyond.

To us, those mountains are not an impediment but a year-round destination. Springtime brings wildflowers to the hillsides. My wife also loves to photograph flowers. Before we left I bought her a macro lens that would allow her to take blossom-filling closeups. Unfortunately, we saw few wildflowers up north, and her new lens never left the camera bag.

Come summer, those mountains provide us with scenic venues for hiking, biking, climbing and camping. We also have trains to ride, rivers to raft, ghost towns to explore and hot springs to enjoy.

Of course Canada has all that, too, along with something else. They have bugs, especially the ones that fly, bite and suck blood. Granted, we also have mosquitoes and a handful of other annoying insects, but rarely have I found them to be a major problem.

A few years ago I was given a Thermacell, an insect-repellant device that vaporizes allethrin to form up a Deet-free, 15-foot mosquito protection zone. I never got a chance to use it in Colorado because we found too few bugs to warrant firing it up. That was not the case up north.

Folks joke that the mosquito is Canada’s national bird, and I believe them. In most of the areas we camped, the flying phlebotomists attacked relentlessly. That Thermacell, augmented with cans of Deep Woods Off, got plenty of use.

Autumn can be breathtakingly beautiful up north, but I find Colorado’s autumn-gilded hillsides to be equally eyeappealing. When winter’s snow follows, those mountains become our winter-sports magnet.

“So what’s your favorite ski area?” Canadians would ask.

“We usually ski at Keystone or Breckenridge,” we’d tell them, “with frequent trips to Vail and Beaver Creek. We’ll take long weekend trips to Aspen, Snowmass, Steamboat, Crested Butte or Telluride and there’s always A-basin, Loveland,