The Omegas have been off gallivanting across the southwest to attend the Labor-Day weekend China Heritage Camp at Snow Mountain Ranch, Fraser, CO.  We left Thursday night and spent the night in a small town in Utah.

The next morning, OmegaMom woke up, sat up, and leaned over her dotter...

And the room spun around, and around, and around.

OmegaMom, alarmed, stood up. 

And the room spun around, and around, and around.

Remember that feeling, oh-so-long ago, of being just totally drunk, and no matter how much you tried to keep the room from spinning, it wouldn't stop?  This was sort of like that.  Luckily, Mr. OmegaMom had a similar thing happen a few years ago, so we knew it was an inner ear infection of some sort wreaking havoc with my proprioceptive sense rather than a Dire Disease which needed immediate emergency attention.

We motored on to the camp that day, winding through canyonland Utah (bee-yoo-ti-ful!) and then hitting I-70 and trekking across Colorado.

Now.  When someone says to you, "Interstate Highway", what's your first response?  Mine is "flat, bee-line straight, boring".  I believed MapQuest, and figured it would be a straight, high-speed shot from one side of Colorado to the other. 

I was forgetting one small thing:  the Rocky Mountains.

Those of you who live in Colorado are laughing your heads off right now.

I-70 twists and turns and soars through the low-lying western Colorado mountains, following the Colorado River, then plunges into Glenwood Canyon.  Once you come out of Glenwood Canyon, the highway rises and rises and rises through the western flank of the Rocky Mountains, slipping in and out of tunnels (the biggest being, of course, the Eisenhower Tunnel), passing innumerable ski resorts and swanky mountain towns.

Then you turn off I-70 to take Highway 40 (not I-40, this confused me a bit) through twisty turny Berthoud Pass.  We managed to do it on an evening when the clouds had come down to hover over the mountain tops and pour down the western side.  We dove into the clouds just as we started hitting the 15-MPH hair-pin turns going up to the pass. 

OmegaDad drove very cautiously.

Then we emerged into Fraser Valley, drove through Winter Park (straight into the setting sun), located our turnoff, and found ourselves in another world--one where everywhere you turned, there were Asian faces:  little girls, teenage boys and girls, adults.

By Sunday, the ear infection had turned into a nasty case of post-nasal drip (ewwww!).  Monday morning, we got up at the crack of dawn, chowed down on (free!) food at the commons, piled into the Little Green Car again, and drove for 13.5 hours straight back home.  During which time, my eyeballs began to feel fried, my left ear's hearing left me feeling like I was in a deep deep tunnel and everyone was talking outside that tunnel, every bone began to ache, yadda, yadda, yadda.

We stopped to play in the Colorado River in Glenwood Canyon and got many pictures.

When we reached our town, the dotter (who did amazingly well being stuck in a car for 13 hours!) exclaimed, "I can't believe my eyes!", then, a few miles later, caroled happily, "I so love Small Mountain University Town!"

So today, I am home, dosed up with NyQuil and ZiCam (oh, those zinc tablets taste foul!).

Next post:  the camp.

Photos:  to come.  The USB cable to my camera is Somewhere In a Large Piece of Luggage.  I hope.

Technorati: road trips, Colorado, Glenwood Canyon, China Heritage Camp, colds