6/28/13: Friday, June 28: Slowly the Land Rises: Because Burlington is at more than 4,000 feet, I know that the land is rising slowly, slowly before me. I wonder what Estes Park will be like. I've received feedback requests from several of the KOAs I've stayed at on my way back, but I can't remember a thing about some of them. This rushing back doesn't suit me, and I feel a deep weariness now.

   I wonder, too, if the seeming flatness of the western plains is due to the gradual rise and greater aridity: there are few streams to cut into the land, to leave behind the lush, shallow valleys that made eastern Kansas so pretty. Thus, it seems there are fewer hills and less relief.

   I wrote the above in the motel this morning before taking off. Naturally, the elevation gain grew more noticeable for a while, as if to defy my title for today!

   In less than a week I shall be home, if all goes well, home with Da Boyz and glad of it. The cost for gas, running these last few days across the prairies and plains with the air conditioning sucking the tank dry and drier, has been shocking, except that I'm almost incapable of being shocked right now. Highway near-misses shock me. I think if I make it, I shall be ready to sit and stay in the same place for a while -- at least till mid-August.

   Leaving Junction City yesterday morning, I saw rising out of the hazy blue distance in the west the ghostly frames of immense but spindly structures, as if white aliens had landed in the night. My guess was that they were immense wind turbines, as they indeed proved to be. I've never been that close to them, I guess. Twice I passed a truck loaded with a single turbine blade, and I couldn't believe how huge it was; it seemed to go on forever.

   This morning mounds of cumulus clouds rode the blue haze on the horizon. At Limon, CO, I passed under that line of clouds and saw another….Suddenly I was on the outskirts of Denver, CO, in heavy traffic on a freeway with weedy brown roadsides -- gee, I miss them a lot less than I thought; they're pretty ugly -- soon to bear northwestward for Estes Park. I had no idea the Rockies were so far from Denver! But soon I was skirting the green foothills as I passed through Boulder.

   Then up on a road that reminded me of California State Highway 89 over Monitor Pass, and into Estes Park's KOA campground! My campsite looks right into Rocky Mountain National Park, straight at Longs Peak, the highest in the park. It is 7,500+ feet here, cool and dry, and right now we are enjoying the most fabulous lightning show I have ever seen! It is amazing, spectacular! The flashes show not only as sheet lightning and huge bolts but through the clouds as brilliant lavender and rosy purplish light! Not all that much thunder, but WHAT A SHOW!

   I looked in the local phone book for my cousin Todd Browne, saw a K Browne and a D Browne, but no T Browne. Cammy tells me he actually lives in Golden, CO. I haven't seen him for perhaps 50+ years, so maybe now I never will. He's probably too big to dress up as a baby angel now, anyway.