Birthday Inspiration

My heart lives there with the old and new

Here’s a video I made today about our weekend. It’s also on my You Tube Channel. Near the end, there are a few video clips of scenes matched with old pastel paintings I did about 25 years ago.

I’m back from our getaway to Mt. Princeton. It was everything you could fit into two days that is fun and relaxing and inspirational. There’s so much to say, but I’m tired tonight and I will get back to a more regular schedule in a day or two. Right now we are having winds with up to 80 mph gusts and our backyard fence already tried to fall over. Dennis put some boards up to help it get through the next couple of days. We are supposed to continue with this wind for a couple more days and then I saw a forecast that I don’t want to believe, that calls for temperatures in the 90s here next week.

I might have to plant my garden early.

I love the Arkansas River Valley and the whole area around it. I know why I like the Mt. Princeton hot springs resort, and it’s not the hot springs. They are a bonus, but what I really love is looking at Mt. Princeton and Mt. Antero. It’s truly breathtaking.

Mt. Antero (left) and Mt. Princeton (behind the dramatic avalanche chute on the sub-peak in front)

I also decided that I no longer want my ashes scattered in Devil’s Cornfield in Death Valley. Instead, I want them scattered in Chalk Creek canyon above Nathrop near the hot springs. Then they will travel down to the Arkansas River below the Collegiate Peaks.

The inner peace I get just walking around downtown Salida, the deserted streets in the morning and the quiet, cool, still air, brings me back to the times when I lived in these tiny places in Western Colorado. No rush, no noise, nothing that needs attention right now. I can keep that feeling for a while when I’m in Fort Collins, but I need to go back and recharge it often. More often than I have been.

Salida was awesome to go back to. The old buildings…so many reminders of simpler times in the past.

Just a few sights in downtown Salida.

We also had a few little unexpected moments, like finding an outrageously awesome Thai restaurant half a block from the river in Salida. I got a free birthday margarita at the spa bar by the pool. And the people checking out of the room next to us when we arrived gave us a good bottle of wine that they couldn’t take back with them on the flight home. We did go to our winery too, so we came home with plenty of wine!

We stopped in a local artist’s gallery and studio, I heard of her before, she’s been around Salida for while. We talked as I asked about having her own studio and getting it to work. She said sometimes you just have to take that leap of faith. She thought Fort Collins would be a good place to be able to sell art, but it’s not the same kind of tourist town as Salida. There are pros and cons of each. I imagine commercial space leases are expensive in both places. I was shocked at the real estate prices in Salida. You can’t touch a small old home downtown for under a million plus.

Salida has been gentrified like all the other formerly quiet tourist/ranching/mining towns. Dennis and I were talking about that on the way home, remembering back 8n the 70s and 80s before everything became so commercialized and corporate greed began to take over every aspect of society. It’s a completely different world. I hope somehow people in the future can find their way back to a way of life that isn’t entirely corrupted by greed.

I’m glad I can still remember those days when not everyone and everything and every article of clothing and every surface on the back of a car wasn’t a moving advertisement for some billionaire. I can remember when the big controversy in running had to do with whether it was acceptable to put a race sponsor’s logo on the race shirt at all. Now they give you logo stickers to be their advertisement after they charge you a gazillion dollars for the race entry and swag.

I sound like an old fart, you think? Smacking my gums as I say, “I remember back in the day when we walked ten miles to school and it was uphill both ways in the waist-high snow.” Next I’ll be talking about all my physical ailments and all my friends’ problems. “Betty had diverticulitis”… blah blah.

But there are advantages… in the old days there wouldn’t be a Thai restaurant downtown. There would be an Eye-talian restaurant and a diner that serves liver and onions and those would be your only choices. And if you were a vegetarian you could order a plate of dry spaghetti or a baked potato, and iceberg lettuce on the side. I can remember doing that in Ouray, Colorado on a mountain bike trip in the San Juans in the late 80s!

We are home now with our girls and they are thrilled to have us back. I think we might have missed them more than they missed us, though! It was fun to get away with Dennis.

I’m excited to start painting again. And once this wind dies down, get back on the trails. More ahead…