The time comes in any road trip when it’s time to head for home. We’ve been wandering in that direction, turning north and east a few days ago. We had considered a more southern route but that would add to the time in the driver’s seat, and after over 6200 miles so far, I’m ready to do a little less driving.
Now that we’ve left Utah we’ve set our sights on home and the travel will reflect that. We would love to explore more of Colorado, but the higher elevations and the time of year really don’t work well for staying warm. The fastest way to get home is on the Interstates, so, on the Interstates we go. Normally I like to take the minor roads as they are slower and more interesting, but once we get out of the Rockies, there really isn’t much on I-70 or I-80 for several hundred miles, even on the minor roads.
Last night’s camp site was super convenient, less than a mile off I-70. The only issue was a half mile or so of deeply rutted roads, which required some concentration to keep from bottoming out some essential part on the RV.
As was the case several other times on this trip, we were being chased by snow. It was snowing steadily for most of the trip through the Rockies, so we kept going with the exception of one stop for supplies in Frisco.
We’re not against making stops, however. We stop at anything interesting, and today’s interesting thing was the Denver Mint. This place still churns out pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters by the truckload and also makes collector coins. They do tours and Deb spent a good deal of time arranging a 3:30pm tour for us, most of that time spent looking for places to park. Downtown Denver is not exactly RV-friendly as most parking places are set up for passenger cars. We finally ended up parking on the street and plugging two meters because we took two spaces.
Interesting tour. One thing I was not aware of: they store about $80 billion of the gold for the United States Treasury in this facility. That’s about 20% of the US gold reserves. The rest is stored in Fort Knox and West Point. We were able to view about $2 million of that. They filed us past a room with heavy bars across the doorway which contained a large balance with three gold bars one one of the pans.
Security, of course, was tight and there were some nonsensical Covid policies in place. Unmasked groups in the small waiting room were fine, but we were not allowed to see the grand entry hall due to Covid. Huh?
It was rush-hour when the tour was done. This is when a small RV can feel really huge: when piloting it out of downtown Denver during rush-hour. We got on I-70 headed east, and stopped a few hours later in a rest area just over the Kansas border. We’ve overnighted here before. This particular rest area has a loop that goes back to an RV dump. Since it is now 22 degrees, I dumped the grey tank, put some antifreeze in the black tank, and parked in the loop for the night, away from the trucks and the freeway.
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