In the morning in Cortex, no breakfast service at the motel. The breakfast room was cleaned out and empty. No coffee service either. Snack bags available, one per guest, with granola bars and water. To check out I had to drop my room key into a bucket of water that presumably had bleach or something in it. I forget something in our room, and have to go back and fish the keyt our of the bucket, grabbing four incorrect keys before I find the one to room 1956.
We went downtown for breakfast at a drive-up/walk-up coffee shop in an Airstream trailer that advertises "second best coffee" in the West. We go inside with our masks, into the tiny trailer and order breakfast burritos and hot drinks and pay with a swiped card on the terminal, where they turn around you have to sign with your finger tip and indicate the tip. Tipping is less pleasant this way.
We ate outside on the table. A couple other cards drove up and ordered too. Then we get on the road and head over to Durango, which is about an hour's drive. We park in downtown in the metered spaces in the alley while I go inside to Jean Pierre's bakery on College Street. I stand in line with my mask at the bakery counter. Lots of people waiting for a sit-down table, inside and out. At the counter I order the usual selection to go---a couple plain croissants, plus pain au raisin, and some filled croissants.
We eat the pain au raisin. I pick at mine while driving north through downtown Durango and heading up the old glacial valley, so lush and green, first with ranches in the valley, and then giving way to forests as you climb to the first of several passes you have to cross in the San Juans. Now I feel like I'm truly in Colorado, when I get up to a high pass.
We come down into Ouray, where we stayed a couple years ago, but this time we just drive through It seems to be lively. Lots of tourists on the streets in the late morning. Then we descend out of the mountains down into the western slope and go up through Ridgway, then Montrose, where we turn east on Highway 50 and drive an hour or so up the sloping valley to Gunnison.
Then we turn off US 50 and head north on the road to Crested Butte, where I have never had occasion to visit before, as it is down a dead end in the mountains about thirty miles off highway 50. Our hotel that I booked online is not in the town of Crested Butte itself---the old mining and cattle ranching town in the floor of the valley, but up on the side of the mountains in the ski village, which only dates from the late 20th century---Mount Crested Butte, it is called.
The ski village there is a plainer, more accessible version of the ski villages around places like Aspen and Telluride---"new" towns built next to older ones. But somehow I like it a lot more, because Crested Butte is so sleepy and less glamorous than those other places, and so the ski village feels oddly like a throwback to the Colorado of the 1970s---lower key and more no-frills family-oriented.
Our room is in the main ski lodge at the bottom of the ski slope. Of course it is out of the winter season. It was easy to book. But everything feels especially shut down. There is no food service a tall. Housekeeping is an extra charge now. We agree that this is the wave of the future, like the way airlines started charging for bags. Now hotels will always charge for housekeeping.
Our room isn't ready at the ski lodge, so we have to kill time going into town. We park near the main street of old Crusted Butte. The main street---Elk Avenue--- is partially blocked off because of the shutdown so the restaurants can put their tables outside. The main street is swarming with tourists. From the license plates it seems like almost everyone is from Texas.
We eat dinner indoors at a pizza place that J finds online, right on Elk Avenue. They put us in a seat by the window. It is a relief to pull off our masks when we sit down. We eat pizza and look out at the Texans walking up and down the street. Masks mandatory in the car-free outdoor section of Elk Avenue. Almost everyone in compliance with the signs.
The next morning we eat the croissants from Durango and discover to our horror that they are not real croissants. The baker who worked there, who knew how to make real croissants, must have left. They are simply the kind you get in most of America. I feel sad for this and then realize how amazing it was to have found real croissants in the middle of the Colorado Rockies, and that one cannot really expect to fin them in a place like Durango. It was a miracle that was short-lived.
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