Day Two of the Rocky Mountain Adventure

And an update....read below first if you haven't already....We pulled into the Utah KOA and our Rv neighbors said 'hey were you in Las Vegas last night at the Oasis?  Well yes we were...so obviously we had traversed the same route so I had to ask...'what did you think of that pass with the roadwork?' This well seasoned RV'er pulling a trailer said ' that was some scary passage' So I felt both vindicated and calibrated.....this was indeed maybe some of the scariest stuff we will face.  Turns out our neighbors were from near San Diego and had a lot of similarities.


We left the Las Vegas Oasis park at 7:15 a.m. for what we thought was going to be shorter drive but according to the gps lady we would arrive at 1:09 p.m. very close to yesterdays time.  We puzzled about that and set off and mid way through the trip discovered that the analog clock said 11:15 while the digital watch said 12:15.....time change, our first and we totally forgot about it.

The morning cloud formations were beautiful, which is great because the beauty is a counter balance for my fear......and today was scary for me.  You may have gathered from previous posts, I'm the chicken in the family, the scaredy cat, the fretter.......I can rationally tell myself all is well, and I am happy I'm  out here challenging my fears, but yep, I'm a little tad anxious. So....first the beautiful scenery.

I drove for a couple of hours yesterday and today I announced I'd take a turn.  All was well, nice wide 2 lane roads, some gentle curves and smallish grades no sweat and then.....Well I need to preface it with I have had a recurring nightmare since I was young.  I take a wrong turn while lost and end up on a scary windy high road to nowhere.  I'm sure there are plenty of dream interpretations for this, and they are probably very revealing, but I've not had the dream for quite a while which I interpret as having arrived at being mostly comfortable in my own skin.  So I'm driving along and it's clear there are some mountains and it's always a bit hard to tell, are we hugging the foothills or going through, is there a canyon we don't see yet....no, it was a pass and there I was on it.  No problem, I can do this, people do all the time right?  Then it gets a bit curvier and a bit steep and then there is roadwork!  It is one lane wide, it's high, it's curvy and there is a jersey barrier on both sides.  It's my nightmare and I'm driving.  There is nowhere to pull over of course and there is nothing to be done except to avoid the full on panic attack I thought was approaching.  I asked Mark to just talk to me calmly, tell me we were fine, it was ok to go slow......well we made it of course.  It was about 2 miles of sheer panic and once I had two lanes again I thought, heck I can do this, THIS is easy.  Which is about the only upside of the experience.  This is day two, I suspect we'll have more uncomfortable (for me) moments, but I'm betting the good experiences will far outweigh them.

I relinquished the wheel soon after and sat back to relax and take a couple of more photos.

We're staying in Fillmore which apparently used to be the capital of Utah.  Hard to tell it now.  But it's the type of campground I like....gravel with lawn and trees between RV's.  I look forward to the desert sky tonight and the cooler temps.  It's currently 82 but that's substantially down from yesterdays 99.  We're enjoying a breeze and an afternoon off.  I'm about to decide whether to bead or knit and if it's knitting which shawl will I knit?