durango colorado

that's where we are today, saturday the 30th. sounds like the name of a tv show. DURANGO, starring clint eastwood or something like that. nice town, good size, nice shops maria, you would like it. lots of restaurants, some art galleries. so i've been trying for at least 30 minutes to get more pictures up, but alas, no luck. i will keep on trying. i can't figure out what the problem is, sometimes it works, other times no luck at all. and i do the same things every time. wtf????

so we went to mesa verde this morning, spent about 5 hours there i guess. brought our own lunch, as it was recommended to us. good idea. went to the cliff palace of these stone homes built into and under a cliff. kind of like san juan de la penya. really cool. lots of steps down, and then back up. breathless, i was left. we're at 7000 feet, so the oxygen we're getting is a lot cleaner than what's in NJ, but there's a lot less of it. a lot of nice pix, if i could only post them...

i think tomorrow we're going to take one of these rr trips up the mountains. durango to silverton. they say the scenery is fabulous and much more than you could ever see from your car on the road.

two weeks from today we come home. looking forward to it. all the hotel rooms are starting to look alike, and it's kind of hard (for me at least) to remember exactly what happened in what town and when.

we go to taos on monday. have to cross the continental divide again, and we will have no choice but to cross via one or two of these 10k + feet passes. hope the weather is okay.

so after about 4 weeks of seeing these many towns, i find that almost all of them have a strip on the outskirts of town where all the "new" commercial activity is going on. that's where you find the BK's, McD's, Walmarts, the hotel chains, the applebee's, in and out burger, etc, etc. all the things that the corporations are doing to homogenize the american - make that the world - lifestyle. i hate it. the strip-malling of america. it's not only NJ, the strip-mall state. i've ranted about this before. that's why i like doll's better than bennigans. that's why you will never find me in a red lobster restaurant. this is a serious cultural problem in america. meanwhile the original downtown areas next to the strips are left to decay and are left for marginal people; not to stereotype, but that's what it looks like to me. the good thing is there are exceptions. new brunswick has done a nice job bringing the downtown back. this town we're in now, durango, is a nicely maintained downtown with lots of viable businesses thriving here. that's at least what it looks like.

i'm done for now. i'll try the picture thing again. see you soon. miss you all. 2 weeks to go.