Out of juice, Nothing, Slow train to Silverton

So last night Cindy and I stayed up almost 3 hours after ingesting our THC gummy fish and did not experience anything out of the ordinary.  The only thing at all I can report is I slept slightly better last night than other nights on the trip thus far and I recall having some odd imagery in my head as I was falling asleep.  We are doing another experiment tonight, we each downed two fish and we are doing so earlier in the day.

We pulled out of Colorado Springs pretty early so we could get to Durango at a reasonable time.  The 315 miles we had to travel was by far our shortest driving day in the trip but it took awhile.  The reason is the terrain we were covering was very mountainous.  We noticed the Prius sounded like it was really struggling towards the top of a series of inclines.  I already knew from previous road trips that vehicles that spend most of their lives at sea level do very poorly when forced to suck in the thinner air at elevation.

However when I flipped over to the real time power monitoring screen I was concerned when I saw the power meter for the battery be completely empty.  I never saw it show as being fully depleted before.  Cindy was freaked about it and looked it up online.  She quickly found other Prius owners reporting the same thing when driving inclines for prolonged periods of time.

The odd thing was once we crested a big incline and were going down an equally long downhill, the battery meter went from empty to full green in less than 10 minutes.  Despite the numerous mountains we crossed, overall the Prius got fantastic mileage due to it sucking in additional power on the declines.  We averaged over 55 mpg for the 175 miles we traveled after our last fill up, amazing.

The drive of course was very scenic.  Last year when we came into Durango it was dark so we saw very little in terms of scenery.  Today we saw everything in brilliant sunshine, it was beautiful. We stopped for lunch at a place we actually stopped at late at night last year.  Last year they had no food available since it was close to closing time.  This year we scored a mixed bag lunch of grilled cheese, fish sandwich, waffle fries, cottage cheese, and cole slaw.  Cindy and I split all of it.

The GPS had a brain fart and told us our hotel in Durango was where an open field is located.  Luckily it was close enough that we saw the hotel from the highway.  We pulled in around 2:15 local time.  We were surprised when the clerk said the room was still being cleaned and that check in wasn’t until 3 PM.  Um ok, we said we would head into town a bit and be back after three.

On the drive into Durango we stopped at a self serve car wash to blast off the 2400+ miles of road grime and smashed bugs that coated the Prius.  We then parked downtown near the train station.  We wanted to get our tickets for the Durango-Silverton train ride tomorrow.  Since the ride consumes most of the day I thought it would be better to get it out of the way on our first full day in town instead of the second.  The woman that was working the ticket window appeared to be new on the job.

We stood in what was a relatively short line for a very long time because of the snail’s pace this woman handled the transactions.  It was pretty painful.  I swear to handle the two people in front of us took her 15 minutes.  We finally scored the tickets and headed back to the hotel.

By the time we got back it was something like 3:30 so we assumed the room was ready to go.  We assumed incorrectly.  We went up to the room and saw it was still being worked on, wtf?  Cindy asked the cleaning lady what was up.  She said it just had to be vacuumed yet.  We left some of our stuff in the room and walked around checking out the hotel amenities to waste time.  We didn’t get the all clear till almost 4:15, lame.

Besides the slow cleaning crew, the hotel itself seems really nice.  It’s new with free breakfast, an indoor pool, sauna and a decent fitness center.  It’s so nice that we don’t mind chilling out here tonight eating our special gummy fish.

Tomorrow will be all about the train ride.  I am a little worried that the novelty of riding on an old fashioned train will wear off after a total of 5-6 hours on board.