Lissa and I slipped away for a lovely few days on the road, up in southern Colorado.

We camped at Mesa Verda, a favorite spot as much any more for the beautiful piñon-juniper woodlands as the ruins. It's on top of a gently tilting mesa, rising up out of the San Juan Basin into the foot of the San Juans, the rugged southwestern corner of the Rocky Mountains. It's been wracked by fire and drought over the last four or five years, but if anything that makes it more interesting. We've been going long enough that we can see and understand the change.

We spent some time hiking on the mesa, and also took a day to drive up from Durango over Coal Bank Pass to Silverton, some real-deal mountains (Coal Bank Pass is 10,640 feet.).

A bit of serendipity also landed us in Farmington, New Mexico, in time for the town's parade celebrating the start of the 40th annual Connie Mack World Series. In addition to baseball players, there was a remarkable person in an inflatable smoothie costume:

All hail the Smoothie King.