Last night was very windy. I had to get up in the middle of the night to take the tarp off the top of the tent as it was too noisy. Our tent is well ventilated – the inner tent is mostly netting, and the outer flysheet is staked out well away from the inner walls. This means no annoying condensation, but allows the cold wind to blast through the tent. The weather forecast said the wind would die down, but had a low in the mid thirties the following night, and most of our friends were leaving today, so we decided to leave Rocky Mountain National Park a day earlier than planned, and head down to Pat’s house in Breckenridge.

The shortest route took us through Nederland, at first glance a hippie haven in a old mining town, where the main industries are tourism and cannabis. I actually saw a black guy there for the first time in about a thousand miles. Rural Nevada, Utah, and Colorado are not particularly well endowed with African-Americans. However, the most famous resident of Nederland is the Frozen Dead Guy. For reasons too complicated to explain in this blog Nederland has an amateur cryogenic facility, population one. To celebrate this fact they have an annual festival, Frozen Dead Guy Days, with Frozen Dead Guy coffee, hot sauce, and ice cream.

South of Nederland we passed through Central City, another old mining town, with classic western buildings, except that every third building a now a casino, and they were having a vintage car rally, so the place was full of 1920s looking cars and trucks.

On to Pat’s house where there is broadband Internet, hot showers, and mains electricity. After the shower, I set about charging up all the rechargeable devices we have with us. There’s one laptop, one ipad, one kindle, two phones, one lithium ion UPS, one lead acid UPS, one USB battery pack, and two toothbrushes. The UPSes are to run Paula’s CPAP, and recharge phones while camping. Oh, I forgot the two headlights, and the iPad keyboard. I’d better go and recharge those now.

PS. And the camera battery