With the luxury of a house and a driveway, we took some time Sunday morning to rearrange the car a bit make sure things were packed up right. We don’t exactly travel light on these road trips, and keeping the car organized is essential to minimizing the annoyance of more-or-less living out of it, and to making room for everything you want to bring. If you never know where to find anything, it gets annoying fast and tasks like food preparation can take much longer than they otherwise would. However, there are also times when you’re in a hurry and end up just throwing things in there. After a week on the road, it was good to neaten up a bit.
The town of Pagosa Springs is named for the many natural hot springs in the area, and there is a park/spa that channels the water from those springs into something like twenty different baths of varying temperatures. Most range from 90 – 106 degrees Fahrenheit (I was surprised by how noticeable a gradation of two degrees was), but there is one in the 40s. The San Juan River runs through the area as well, and there are multiple places where you can dip yourself in the frigid mountain runoff if you want a contrast to the hot springs.
The self-styled spa wasn’t what we expected, though not necessarily in a bad way. For us out-of-towners, general admission for two plus a locker rental came to nearly $50. Because it’s billed as a “resort and spa” and because of the clientele at other springs we’ve been to, we were expecting a pretty froofy crowd. Thanks to the locals’ discount, though, there was actually a pretty strong working class vibe to the place. Several big families were camped out with coolers and picnic lunches, and there were kids everywhere. We found it fun, but I can imagine some people who were anticipating a relaxing atmosphere being disappointed.
Our skill at chatting with the locals must have been improving, because we got to talking with a rancher who was excited to hear that I was on my way to the World Series of Poker. He told me that he occasionally played a $20 home game with “too much beer and reefer floating around for anyone to take it seriously.” Unfortunately I didn’t get his full life story, but he dropped some interesting tidbits, such as that he attended medical school in Las Vegas before somehow ending up a rancher.
When we moved on to a different bath, he wished me the best of luck and said he hoped I won a million dollars. “I’d settle for half that,” I told him amicably, but he looked genuinely disappointed in me when I said it.
The “spa” was outside, so we’d already gotten a lot of sun before we began our drive to Durango, which felt a lot longer and hotter than it probably would have otherwise.
Durango is a hub for skiing and mountain biking and also the departure point for a scenic train ride to historic Silverton. Consequently, the town caters heavily to the tastes of affluent vacationers who enjoy the outdoors; multiple cars in the parking lot of our hotel had $10,000 worth of bikes attached to their rooves or hitches. These were the people we were expecting to see at Pagosa Springs.
I tease, but the truth is that this demographic augurs well for us. We ate out – only our fourth time in nine days on the road – at an upscale burrito place and filled our cooler with veggies and non-meat proteins at “Nature’s Oasis”. We were back amongst our people.
We visited Durango and Silverton way back too, remember? People came there looking for gold, and named the town because there was no gold but a ton of Silver. Durango is also big for mountain biking, huh?