Trip to the Dunes

My friends and I took a little trip up north to the hot springs and the sand dunes just over the border in Colorado.

The hot springs, Hooper Pools, was pretty great. The facility is nice...basically it looks like a city park pool, except that the water is pumped in from the ground. There's the kinda hot pool, which is larger, and the really hot pool (kinda like the hot tub). After a few hours there, I felt like a wet noodle. Very relaxing.

After that, we drove over to the Sand Dunes park. The north side of the San Luis Valley is home to some epic sand dunes. The San Luis Valley is the largest alpine valley in the world, and apparently the wind carries the sand up to the edge, where it drops out of the air current as the wind goes over the mountain. It's pretty bizarre looking, but very pretty. We hiked around on the dunes and frolicked and sat around. It was also relaxing, although climbing up and down giant hills of sand is pretty tiring.

I'm leaving a week from today. I'm ready to get back to doing something I'm good at. But, I'm very glad I came. Here are some highlights from my time out here in no particular order:

1. Bonding with neurotic cat

2. getting stuck in the snow and having car accidents

3. meeting and befriending lots and lots of quirky people who made me feel at home.

4. learning how to build fences

5. learning how to plant trees

6. starting a nonprofit

7. lots of good jam sessions

8. lots of conversations with Daniel about the nature of reality, girls, and the fate of humanity.

9. Multiple river rafting trips

10. Epic Chubby Bunnies competition

11. Hanging out with, and milking, two goats and their babies

12. First backpacking overnight hike

13. Badly spraining my ankle

14. Seeing the great local group The Brent Barry Band, multiple times and dancing a
lot.

15. Planting lots of starts that almost all died

16. Playing Berlin with middle schoolers

17. Getting 25 middle schoolers to belt out Wagon Wheel (I had to change "had a nice long toke" to "he was a real nice bloke") and Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah".

18. Staring at beautiful mountains.

19. Staring at beautiful valley from mountains

19. Acting in 2 camper-written films: Mr. Quiggles (for which I composed the theme
song) and Kiss of Death. Youtube video to be posted soon.

20. Dressing up as bigfoot and trying to scare children.

21. Making Scarecrows

22. Learning how to irrigate using ditches

23. Being looked-up to by young people (weeeird!)

24. Making pizza dough from scratch for the camp

25. Learning more about writing grants and about nonprofit legal issues

26. Eating lots of stuff containing green chile

27. Choosing between being a Washington D.C. bureaucrat and an academic

28. Being alone a lot

29. "Crewing" for short film production shot in crazy places.

30. Feeling incompetent

31. Writing a few decent songs

32. Hiking through knee-deep snow at night in a blizzard and having my shoe come off, and then having feet so numb that I couldn't tell if my shoe was back on or not.

33. Missing my home