The morning dawned crisper and cooler than I had expected, which was a pleasant change from the heat of the previous afternoon. I slept in a bit, dealt with a few emails from work, and started preparing to depart. I rolled out of the Goodland KOA without indulging in the all-you-could-possibly-stomach pancake breakfast.
The drive to Denver was smooth and quiet, and the drive through Denver was predictably slow. My initial excitement at my first glimpse of the mountains in the horizon turned into a small case of the nerves as I climbed out of Denver and began counting the stranded fifth wheels, travel trailers, and motorhomes on the side of the interstate. I turned off the iPod to concentrate on the sounds of the truck working hard - but thankfully, not too hard - as we lugged up and then paced down through the mountains. My first solo mountain drive with 15,000 pounds either pulling or pushing me was quiet and uneventful. Love ya, Big Blue.
Tiger Run RV Resort was just as I had remembered from a Vintage Airstream Rally held there a few years back - lovely resort, fancy rigs, a few noses too high up in the air at this or any altitude. I scored a back-in Lodge site near, well, the lodge, and I was able to back the fiver in on the first shot. Love ya yet some more, Big Blue.
I unhitched without a snag and then managed to take a grease bath in the simple act of unloading my bike. I haven't ridden this bike for a while, and getting reacquainted with the clipless pedals cost me a few minutes and very nearly a scraped shin. After that aggravation, lunch and some downtime were in order before I took off on the four-mile ride to Breckenridge.
I like and almost love Breckenridge. It has more than its share of historic structures, it's perched alongside the Blue River in the middle of the Ten Mile Range, and it's a very walkable and bikeable town.
The box office for the Riverwalk Center was open, so I picked up my tickets for the Breckenridge Music Festival Orchestra concert tonight and Asleep at the Wheel tomorrow night. After watching oodles of other bike riders, almost all with helmets, I decided to take a ride over to Christy Sports to buy a helmet, which would have been my first in, oh, thirty-six years. But they were already closed for the day, leaving me to wonder if this child of the quit-yer-cryin' generation of helmetless bike riders will actually succumb to the political pressure - and, I guess, the common sense - of wearing a helmet. I then loaded up with some groceries and pedaled back for a quick shower before meeting college friend Jen for dinner and the concert.
I've missed seeing Jen, and it was remarkable how having a girls' night out with her for the first time in fifteen years felt both familiar and strange. But good friendships always feel more familiar than strange irrelevant of the passage of time, and I was reminded of the familiar each time I caught her hiding her boredom during the concert.
I enjoyed aspects of the concert; Khachaturian's Piano Concerto in D-Flat Major featured a brilliant piano soloist and felt, in particularly the first and second movements, reminiscent of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff but with a more modern flair. It also featured a flexatone, a rarely seen instrument most often replaced by the musical saw. I enjoyed the piece; give me a good, conflicted German or Russian composer with a bit of a tortured soul and keep your happy Austrians.
The next concerto was written for the marimba, and a marimba is pretty cool for one movement. By the third movement, all I could focus on was wondering how easy it would be to snap marimba mallets in half. Would it require breaking them over my knee? I think not. I would have liked to have tried at the twenty-three -minute point of that concerto.
When the concert ended, Jen and I said our goodbyes before she headed back to Wheat Ridge. I trotted back to the truck in the cold air and took a slightly evil pleasure in the ability of the sight of a girl behind the wheel of a big crew cab dually in a small parking lot to part a sea of people before heading back to Tiger Run and the virtues of a comfy bed.
