Megan’s Take
As if yesterday wasn’t hard enough, when we rolled into our campsite around 10-10:30 pm last night, Emilia was itching her head. I checked, and she has lice. UGH. For all the anxieties that I had about this trip (steep cliffs, sleeping together in a camper, potty logistics on the road etc), lice was not on my bingo card.
Phil was exhausted, and logistically, we could not get the camper unhooked and Emilia’s hair treated within a reasonable time frame that late at night. So day 2 started with me doing laundry in the campground (thank God for a laundry room with empty washers and dryers!) and Phil driving to Walmart on the other side of Salina KS for lice treatment items. We spent about 4 hours this morning with all that and shampooing, combing, and generally trying to get through life during this “vacation”. Fortunately, it appears that only Emilia has lice, but the next couple weeks or however long will involve bribing Emilia to let me comb her hair.
Once we got on the road, though, we actually drove for 4 hours straight without stopping! That was almost half our drive time for today. We really needed that win. Overall driving went more smoothly today with fewer stops and no mechanical issues. We had some concerns about running out of gas in the middle of nowhere when our fuel economy dropped to 5 mpg, driving into steady 20-30 mph winds, but we made it to a gas station. We enjoyed watching the transition from Kansas grassland to Colorado mountains as we headed into our campground near Great Sand Dunes National Park.
Phil’s Take
For the record, we were not at risk of running out of fuel. I learned my lesson and won’t be doing that again. We did have the worst had mileage I have ever seen, and I had to drop speed a ton to keep from staining the truck a ton and to keep the mileage reasonable. The mileage was like it would be if I tried driving 90. If I would have tried to maintain 65 mph the whole way, which is the speed I usually tow the camper at, we would have definitely been closer to empty on fuel.
The drive is probably boring to most, but I was in awe at how it started out pretty flat and barren, and managed to continually get more flat and barren as we went. As Megan said, we didn’t stop much today, so the pictures are crappy taken from the truck through the bug guts on the windshield, but hopefully it captures it.
We didn’t get any pictures of the mountains, probably because we were distracted by some behavioral issues, but we made it. We’ll make sure to get plenty of pictures tomorrow.
