Before we headed to the West Coast, and Tempe, we had to justify stopping in Durango. Fort Lewis College was the attraction. It proved to be well worth the stop. We finally got to bed about 2:30am on June 19th and had a scheduled campus visit at 9:30am on the 20th. That appointment was very hard to keep. Not only was it hard to get out of bed,
we had a hard time finding where we were supposed to go. It might be a personal problem because it happened at almost every campus. Either that or the directions are written by people who go there every day and don’t notice the inconsistency of the names they use for places and the names of those places on campus maps and buildings. I prefer the second interpretation.
The campus seemed warm and welcoming, and in a beautiful place, and the folks talking to us made a compelling case for applying to Fort Lewis College.
While the the prospective college students pondered, the superfluous parents, Dee and I, went looking for coffee to soften the blow of the short night. We found Durango Joe’s and passed an hour and a half coaxing ourselves into the day. We asked the kind folks at the East College Drive location where to eat lunch and they enthusiastically recommended that we try Zia’s Tacaria. They must have recommended it to everyone in town cuz it was busy.
One thing that every man fears is his wife saying, “The car is making a funny noise.” We pulled into the second tire shop in two days and asked how they did at supporting guys who couldn’t hear the noise. Big shout out to the guys at the tire shop for finding that noise and making it go away. They laughed at me and showed me the little broken plastic part that was responsible. They made the low air pressure warning light go out too! Two issues, both related to yesterday’s flat tire. We paid the man and hopped back on US-160 and got on the road to Tempe, Az.
Oddly, we don’t have many pictures of the drive from Durango to Phoenix and Tempe. Or maybe it’s not so odd; nothing waved and said, “Look at me, Look at me!” The landscape is forbiddingly dry and while it has a stark beauty all its own, it doesn’t lend itself to snapshots. We ran out of daylight in Flagstaff during dinner and once again reached our destination in the dark. We consoled ourselves with the knowledge that we were going to bed on the same day we got up.