Grand mesa

We are spending some extra time in Grand Junction due to a need to have one of our RV slide-outs repaired. It looks to be a part replacement and appears like it will be resolved tomorrow, May 16, 2016. Yea! Who needs delays on Vilia Adventures?

We have gotten to know  GJ better than we might have. It is a good town. Lots of community involvement. They love their baseball and have a long history with the game. Local high school baseball is on the evening news here, in depth. The class system is more obvious here than in many places. There are lots of run down folks and the street corners are well occupied by the sign holding public. It is always sad to see. I hope mankind finds a better way to care for this, often mentally impaired, segment of humanity at some point in our development. Early on in our travels, we decided we were not to just visit places, but to live them. If we have the opportunity to explore, as we have had in GJ, we avoid main roads and Google the back way. With that, we have seen some of the solid middle class of this town. Nicely cared for yards in blocks of good time western single story houses.  Our first house in Denver in the 1970’s was one of the same. 840 square feet. We loved it.

Then, as you get out of town, the wondrous natural beauty and sweeping views are commanded by the well off folks who have built their “Ponderosas” on hillsides to the west, beneath Colorado National Monument and to the east on either side of Grand Mesa.

We had gone up the east side of the Mesa on an unsettled weather day, when we were staying at that Bald Eagle populated state park, but Saturday was too terrific a day so we drove the loop, climbing the Mesa from the easily accessed Eastern side, right off I-70, then cruising the flat elevation, descending the west side some 30 miles south of Grand Junction. All in brilliant sunshine and nice temps. The top of this, the world’s biggest flat topped mountain, Grand Mesa, still holds four to five feet of water rich, dense pack snow as of this date. It is the watershed that allows the Grand Valley below to grow some of our nation’s best peaches along with other fruits and some quite nice wines.