Denver East/Strasburg KOA, Strasburg Saturday, 19 - Tuesday, 22 September 2020
I ended up extending my stay here at this campground because I needed more time to get things done.
I spent a full day on chores: doing laundry, cleaning the windows, dumping the waste tanks, filling the water tank, taking apart and cleaning and storing my baby Weber kettle, finding a post office where David can forward my mail to me, finding a vet for Lily's claws (way overdue), finding a Target where I can buy badly needed refills for the Litter Genie that I regard as a miracle cure for dealing with cat box odors, finding a recycle drop-off center in the Denver area - like that.
And it took me another entire day to make plans and reservations for the next 2 weeks of travel. That was necessary because of the extraordinary full-to-capacity trend in campsites at places I want to go. This is definitely not a state where I can just wing it. I might be able to if I had dogs with different personalities - but I have what I have, and they have to be accommodated as they are.
That booked-up-edness showed right away when I tried to find someplace to stay anywhere at all in the Denver/Boulder/Fort Collins area the next weekend. I couldn't do it. There was nothing there. It turned out to be tough enough finding a place on a Wednesday night, which I still think is absolutely ridiculous. What kind of state is this where I have to hunt around for a place to stay on a Wednesday, for crying out loud, when it's not even a festival or holiday or anything. Just plain weird. I finally ended up just booking my site again here at Strasburg, just so I'd have a guaranteed place to stay. I'm sure it'll be completely packed like it has been this weekend, but I've figured out how to dodge most of the problems after staying here 5 nights now.
I also spent time figuring out what kinds of things I wanted to see in Denver, and figuring out driving routes to get to those places as well as routes for the other days to see things and to get to the campgrounds. I decided I'd better do it now because I might not have an internet signal at some of these campgrounds.
Then I spent several days trying to catch up on my blog posts and got four of them done. I'll only be 2 behind when I leave, which is pretty good lately.
The weather service has put this entire area under an air quality alert for the best part of a week, because of smoke from the various wildfires - both in Colorado and in California. In this area, it's the lower alert level of being "unhealthy for sensitive groups." Strasburg being 30 miles east of Denver probably made it not quite so bad out here, but between the air quality and the extreme dryness of the air due to the ongoing drought, I had a little trouble breathing beyond just altitude problems.
This campground seems to have as many rabbits as it has campers, and they aren't nearly as shy as rabbits I've seen elsewhere. Not only are they out in force during the night, but I saw quite a few of them during the daytimes, which I don't usually. Also, these rabbits seem to have perfected the art of holding statue-still, so they don't just fool Dexter but also blend in with the dirt streets and dusty grass so it's sometimes hard to see them.
And there are so many dogs I almost decided they selected their customers on the basis of whether they're traveling with dogs. One camper had a Great Dane and another had 2 that looked like Dane mixes. Very few small dogs, which is unusual. Actually, that's another thing that's different here in Colorado - it seems like Coloradans are more likely to own big dogs than small dogs, and the small dogs I see tend to live in RVs with out-of-state license plates. At campgrounds throughout my travels I've found it more likely I'd see smaller dogs than bigger ones, but here it's just the opposite.
The 22nd was the First Day of Fall, the Autumnal Equinox. Here the days weren't quite equal with a sunrise of 6:45 and a sunset of 6:53, but it's close.
My birthday turned out to be a nice one. You know how some days everything seems to go just fine while on other days all those same things don't work at all? For instance, if you drop something on some days you can just catch it while on others it hits the floor? Well, that's what happened. The day after my birthday was a hit-the-floor kind of day, while my birthday was a just-catch-it kind of day. I felt lucky that it was that way around.
I saw that the founder of a group called True The Vote said that mail-in voting brings chaos, and chaos is from Satan, which sounds awfully close to saying mail-in voting is from Satan. That surprised me because, after all, our own president votes by mail routinely, including this year.
Speaking of mail-in voting, I've gotten really worried about whether Texas will be able to get my absentee ballot to me in time for me to vote and mail it in time for it to make the deadline. Especially if the post office has been having cut-backs in service due to even worse funding shortages than usual. David tells me my ballot hasn't come in yet, so of course he can't send it to me yet, and it's become an increasing concern.
I finally decided I don't need any concerns coming from outside, since the dogs and I generate plenty on our own. So I'm going to spend October in Kansas, because of it being within a possible day's drive from there to Texas. And I'll just take 3 days out of my time in Kansas, so I can drive down to Texas on one day, go to early voting the next, and drive back the 3rd. And since I came to Colorado 2 days early, I decided I'd go to Kansas 1 day early to try to make up for having to skip 3 days to vote.
And I'm going to say here that this is by no means the first time I've voted while I've been on the road and I'm furious that I'm having to go to all this trouble and expense for something as important as a presidential election.
In fact, I've been getting pretty worried about quite a few current events lately, so to try to stop myself from taking those worries to bed with me I've been watching cheerful movies in the evening. One night it was Walk, Don't Run and another it was Bells Are Ringing and on still another it was The Sting. They helped.
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