Tuesday, July 28

Today was simply incredible, and you'll find out why. Later. Anyway, today we visited Mesa Verde National Park, the first place to become a National Park for cultural reasons as well as scenic reasons. We took a self-guided tour of the Spruce House cliff dwelling of the Puebloans, and a ranger-guided tour of Cliff Palace, the largest Puebloan cliff dwelling in the southwest, with over 150 rooms. By the way, I jogged the Spruce House trail a second time for reasons of getting pictures. I did about two and a half miles on that section of the park so I got a great workout, even though I almost perished of exertion in the 100 degree heat. The tour of Cliff Palace started at 11:30, and lasted about 1 hour. After taking the interesting tour, we all decided to sate our growing hunger and thirst at the Visitor Center restaurant. Believe me, after walking for a couple hours (or jogging) under a Colorado sun, there's nothing better than a little overpriced food in a National Park cafe. Mmmmmmm . . . Following lunch, we began to head back home. However, we encountered a dastardly roadblock. We sat in our car for about 15 minutes, waiting for the traffic to move along, but nothing happened. Finally, a construction-worker-looking guy came along and told us that a car had gone over the edge of the mountain. Now, we were rather shocked, as you can imagine, at least until the guy told us that nobody was in it. I got out of the car to walk to the big scene, and found out that a park ranger had stopped his truck on the side of the road to go check on something; however, he had neglected to put on the parking brake! The car rolled a ways, and then started rolling on its side. It had stopped halfway down. We waited an hour, but didn't see anything of the car coming up on the tow truck wire, so we got back in our truck. Finally, traffic began to pass, and we went past the scene until we got a great angle to view it. The truck literally looked like an oblong ball of metal. If someone had been inside, they surely would have met a horrible end. That was really the last part of our active day. We got back, no issues, and relaxed for the rest of the day. By the way, today was Dad's birthday! We haven't gotten him a gift yet, but our grandparents have; from them, he got five magazines: Car and Driver, Mopar, Diesel World, some home furnishings magazine, and a food magazine. He also get a set of dominos. Today's closing will be in Portueguese: Adeus e boa noite!