Detour

Detours are a hassle, aren’t they? Except, sometimes…

Wait, let me start at the beginning.

Two days ago, we were tooling down the road in Nebraska, bored silly from looking at corn fields, and looking forward to our next stop: Denver. We’d been seeing lots of signs telling us that Route 70 west of Denver was closed, and we wondered why they’d be telling us that when we were still hundreds of miles from Denver. How silly! Why would people in Nebraska care?

Then we googled it.

Turns out the closed road was exactly the one we were planning to take after Denver. But there had been a mud slide, and the road was going to be closed for days. There was no way we were getting through on that route. So, of course, we turned to our GPSs and had them calculate an alternate route.

We expected the GPS to find another route, and knew it would probably add a few minutes to our commute. Back in New England, I probably would have been shocked if the delay had been 30 minutes.

So, image my surprise when my GPS told me that the detour was going to add 2.5 HOURS to our trip.

It seems silly, when you’re on a cross-country trip, to be bothered by an extra 2.5 hours. In the grand scheme of things, 2.5 hours is only a drop in our bucket. The trip is about 3,000 miles long, and we knew it would take 40 to 50 hours. So why is 2.5 hours such a big deal?

Because I’m a mega-planner, that’s why. Because I had each day mapped out, and each stop carefully planned. My plan called for us to spend 8 to 9 hours on the road each day. We’d be in our hotel room by dinner time, leaving us rested and ready for more travel the next day. An extra 2.5 hours? Well, that meant we’d miss our dinner-time arrival, dang it. And that would mean we’d be tired the next day, which would translate into extra stops, which would further dent my plan.

And, because when you’ve already spent 32-ish hours in the car, and you’ve got another 16-ish hours left in the car, you REALLY don’t want to spend one extra minute in the car, much less 150 of them.

You can believe that Tyler and I thoroughly researched our options. Why was it 2.5 extra hours? Were there other roads closed due to the mudslides? Would they be open by the time we got there?

Turns out, there aren’t a lot of roads you can take out of Denver if you want to reach the west coast. You see, there’s these things called the Rocky Mountains (you might have heard of them), and it turns out there aren’t a heck of a lot of roads that pass over them. You can take Route 70, which is a straight shot, directly west, when it’s open. Which, right now, it’s not. You can take Route 285, which drops to the south before cutting over to Utah. Or you can take Route 34 to the north, which runs right through Rocky Mountain National Park. Like, seriously, right through the park. And the travel time, compared to the southern route? Nearly identical.

Well, Tyler and I thought about it for a hot second, and then we immediately started double-checking routes, researching the park, and calculating how much this was going to disrupt our trip.

I hemmed and hawed a lot. Just ask Tyler. He’ll tell you that I just about blew a gasket with the stress of trying to wrangle all of the moving pieces. Here’s what had to transpire in the course of about 30 minutes, all with frustratingly spotty cell phone service:

Find a different hotel for that night – one close to the entrance of the park
Debate about the extra money – my, aren’t hotels expensive in vacationland!!
Check the park hours and COVID closures
Check the travel time to the new hotel
Determine how to get from one park gate to the other
Check the travel time from the exit of the park to our next destination
Find a different hotel on the other side of the park – one close to the park exit – for the next night
Cancel two hotel reservations
Obsess about how these changes would impact the rest of our trip

As my wise son pointed out to me, I was once again over thinking everything.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” he asked. You’d think he’d have learned not to ask that question of the Queen of Worry in his 23 years on this earth. I could have given him a very long list. But he wisely followed up with, “We’ve got this. It’ll be an adventure!”

And I was SOLD!

Have you noticed that park rangers are a happy bunch? I challenge you to find a grumpy park ranger. They are friendly, helpful people who are never in a bad mood, as far as I can tell. So, Tyler got on the phone with a lovely park ranger named Deb, and Deb cheerfully filled us in on everything we needed to know. We explained that we were just passing through on our way to California, and she pointed us to the perfect car trip through the park, from the east gate to the west gate. She explained all of the COVID precautions that are in place, and told us how to beat the “reservations required” notice that we’d seen on the website.

Deb’s plan was perfect! We arrived at the park at 7:00 am the next day, and were cheerfully greeted by the park rangers at the gate, who collected our $25 fee. We drove straight through the park, started in Estes Park, and ending at Grand Lake. This 45-mile drive took us about 5 hours. If you do that math, you’ll find out that we averaged 9 miles per hour on this trip. Now, 9 miles per hour is frustrating when you’re sitting on the highway. But when you’re in Rocky Mountain National Park? Nope. It’s pretty much perfect.

We stopped at almost every pull-out on the road. At most of them, we got out of the car and took pictures. We read all the signage. We did a couple of little hikes. I’ll tell you what – for people who were just passing through the park, we absorbed a LOT of the sights.

And the drive! Oh, the drive! I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s equal parts terror and awe. You are in perpetual danger of hurtling off a cliff because you’re so busy ogling the vistas. First the mountains are towering over you, and you stare up in wonderment, seeing the tiny specks of cars up there. Then you climb and climb and climb, until you are above the trees, and on level with clouds. Literal clouds! Then you’re looking down at the green flatlands below, and the tiny specks of cars that are starting out just where you did.

You climb so high that you reach the tundra, where trees can’t grow, and the meek vegetation clings close to the ground. So high that your lungs complain after a very short walk. So high that you look down on clouds hovering around neighboring peaks. So high that there’s still snow on the ground in July. So high that the temperature drops to 48 degrees.

And then, after oohing and ahhing at the summit, you descend, keeping your foot hovering over the brake mile after mile, trying not to ride them all the way down. Some brave soles don’t seem bothered by the lack of guard rails or shoulder – are they not aware that one wrong move will lead to prolonged terror as your car sails through the very thin air? That if they go off the road, they’ll have several seconds to contemplate their painful and imminent demise before their car finally reaches ground at a significantly lower altitude?

Me? I straddle that yellow line, using only half of my lane, plus half of the other lane. When traffic in the other direction forces me back into my own lane, I still hug that yellow line, staying as far away from the edge as I can.

And then the road twists back on itself, and suddenly I’m on the inside – the good side – the side away from the plunge of death – and I can enjoy the drive once again. And its spectacular. By the time we reach the bottom, I have used up my quota of “Wows” for at least the next week.

My only regret is that I visited what MUST be the best national park so early in my national park quest, because all of the others have got to be disappointing now.

Detours. They are endlessly annoying, but sometimes, the lead you exactly where you should be.