The Boss’s Husband plus nephew turned up eventually after a problem on the Interstate between Vail and Denver with an overturned truck necessitated a ninety-mile detour. It is when things like this happen that you understand how important building the Interstate Highway was. They seem pleasant and are here to do a whole lot of remodelling of kitchens in both Chalets, replacing carpet with wooden flooring etc so will be here for a couple of weeks before going over to Breckenridge to look after the guests who are booked in there for the Easter week, the hosts from there having gone home early as we will be doing.
After cleaning all day, we went out for a meal at the Blue Plate Bistro and had an excellent meal, paid for by the Management, making it even sweeter.
Packing to go home was strange as we have been doing things ‘for the last time’ for some days now eg feeding guests, cleaning bathrooms, filling up the birdfeeder (fortunately the nephew will take over this duty), and the time had really come.
All week it has been beautifully clear with blue skies and on Thursday night it started to snow. It snowed and snowed and by Friday morning at 7.00 when we set off for the airport, it was about 10” deep and still snowing. The slopes will be beautiful but as far as we were concerned it could be a nuisance if the flights were screwed up. We got to the Airport at Eagle which is a tiny, very cosy local one and were relieved to find that we were being boarded as per normal. Then we sat, waiting for the tarmac to be hoovered or whatever they do, continued to sit as the visibility didn’t improve, taxied over to the de-icing plant to be sprayed with orange and green liquid, sat some more, waited for the visibility to improve, taxied back to the terminal and disembarked. Four hours later the cycle was repeated taxiing hither and thither, being de-iced, then allelujah took off for New York and JFK airport. We were scheduled to catch the 7.20pm flight to Heathrow after a four hour wait so we weren’t too fazed at being held up, but as it turned out we missed that one so now pinned our hopes on getting across the terminal to check in on the last flight out at 10.30 pm. Of course my concern was that, although we could walk across and get on the plane OK, would our luggage be as swift? I had visions of turning up at Heathrow with our luggage still somewhere in JFK, but I’m impressed to say that it was with us on the plane. Thank you American Airlines. Much relief at the Heathrow luggage carousel as you can imagine. We had been in touch with a friend who was going to meet us and we started looking for him just as he started looking for us which was great as the alternative involved taxi to Paddington, train to Worcester, and a taxi home. As it was we stopped for a mega-breakfast at a Little Chef (perhaps surprisingly I would thoroughly recommend this), and were delivered to our door. Thanks Andrew – you’re a star!
Then it was the usual wading through a two foot pile of mail principally comprising begging letters from the bank, invitations to install double-glazing, to take up an American Express card etc etc, but with one bright spot with a letter from the Inland Revenue and a tax refund cheque for £175!
We had had a couple of hours sleep on the plane so were trying to stay awake until the evening to readjust to UK time and it seemed to work. After a lie-in on Sunday we were about sorted re jet-lag which was a relief.
The cats were pleased to see us after the statutory period of ignoring us for leaving them, and then wouldn’t let us out of their sight. It’s nice to be loved!
One of the first jobs was to start the Aga which had foiled the heating engineer in December so dramatically when the kids were trying to cook a Christmas meal. It turned out that the reason the oil wasn’t flowing was that a rather hard-to-see valve had tripped so all was well and we had a warm house again.
Next job was to take down all the Christmas decorations. It is a good job we have an eco-friendly plastic tree or the floor would have been knee deep in needles. As it was the holly sprigs started the fire and gave a jolly crackling start to proceedings.
We then had a succession of catching-up-with-friends-and-relations outings and meals, meeting George (Sue’s new nephew), meeting our new Grandperson (AKA - the bump), shopping to restock the larder and getting the car to start.
One of our neighbours had kindly been starting it every so often so all it needed was a battery charge, tyre pumping and it was ready to go – not! We set off and it stopped half a mile later on the main road. I lifted the bonnet and fiddled with everything that looked fiddly and it started. Great – not. Then it stopped and wouldn’t start no matter how much fiddling I did. So it was a job for super mechanic Nigel and it was picked up and taken for professional fiddling while we took a bus to Worcester to sort out a glitch in the Mortgage payments which has stopped when we transferred the accounts to the Co-op before we left.
Sue went to the Doctor’s hoping to get a fast-track MRI scan on her shoulder and was told that it would be 6 – 8 weeks unless we paid the nice man £300 for a private one. We are looking at exercising patient choice and going to Swindon where the wait is only 2 weeks. All a bit frustrating and not what we hoped for at all.
Having just about got things sorted it is time to reflect on the last few months.
America in general and Colorado in particular was big, very big. The mountains were wonderful and everything you expect from mountains with snow, wonderful sunsets, deep blue sky (owing a lot to the altitude), breathtaking (literally) high passes, stunningly deep canyons, marvelous views and simply the best snow any of us had experienced anywhere.
The people we met were unfailingly courteous and polite, with smiles and cheerful greetings from all the pisteurs looking after the chairlifts, and ‘thank you for coming to our mountain’ being a typical closing comment. Such a difference from the French who regarded all skiers as a necessary evil placed between them and their pay cheque. The system of queuing was typical with the American model forming up into groups of four in readiness for the chair and where a single skier, noticing a three-group and giving a polite ‘excuse me, are you a three – can I join you’ was always greeted with ‘sure, where are you from?’ Again so different from the French queuing ethos, which was every man (and woman) for him(or her)self, elbows out and to hell with anyone else.
The houses and towns were strange as they were inevitably wood-clad with felt strips for roofing as opposed to tiles or slates, and brick buildings were revered as curiosities. It was difficult not to be patronizing with regard to the age of the towns when we are used to having buildings reflecting hundreds of years of development and local history, but the feeling was that history had happened very quickly with lots and lots of events having taken place in a very short period of time. We were fascinated by the towns that had started as tents during the gold rushes of the 18th century, grown, crashed when the gold ran out, boomed again when silver was discovered, crashed again when that ran out, and usually bloomed to a lesser degree with other industries such as skiing or tourism or when other minerals such as gypsum or molybdomen were discovered. It was interesting that with the current rise in gold prices, some of the old workings are once again being sifted through, especially the tailings, and the tourist mines are now going back to commercial production.
We were disappointed not to find evidence of the Native Americans anywhere in the mainstream of American culture, it was as though they had been airbrushed out and sidelined to such an extent that it was all but invisible. Perhaps this is from a sense of guilt at their earlier treatment, but it did seem a missed opportunity to embrace a readymade, and incredibly rich, cultural heritage extending for thousands of years, which is what the Americans (white) generally seem to realize they lack. We could also see a developing underclass of Hispanic speakers who did the menial tasks that enabled the rich white condo owners to continue in the style to which they were accustomed.
The guests we looked after yielded the usual mix of delightful and tedious, with those we will definitely keep in touch with and those we won’t, while the Boss was a pleasure to work for, having given us the measure of autonomy and respect with which we felt comfortable.
Will we go back to Colorado? – definitely, there was so much to see that we were unable to get to and as far as skiing was concerned - it was sublime. And that was in a year (El Niño), when the locals were bemoaning the lack of snow!
It’s back to the humdrum of life, with a wet spring in the offing and the need to find gainful employment to support the revamping of bathroom and kitchen that WILL happen this year!
I leave you, gentle reader, with three of my favourite pictures of the trip; a view from the top of the mountain, a shot of the Hanging Lake and a wonderful walk we did on the mountain opposite Vail.
Adieu!
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