Here’s a picture of one of the two guides who took us on our wonderful, wonderful four-hour horseback-riding trip last week outside Ouray, Colorado through the company Action Adventures. The other guide will show up in a later post. These guys were just great: friendly, conversational, helpful . . . you name it. They took us on an absolutely magnificent back-country ride to the top of Mt. Baldy. (If you’d like to get a flavor of how steep and narrow the trail was you can watch this video of a similar ride, or portions thereof–it’s not terribly high quality but shows the conditions quite well. As far as I know it’s not associated with Action Adventures.)
As I said to Jim after our ride, “We could have gone up there and seen all that stuff, but if the guides had been dour and silent we wouldn’t have enjoyed it much.” And they were by no means the only interesting people we met. There was the retirement-age couple on the free gondola ride in Telluride (a true find, and one that happened totally by chance): the little birdlike woman in the cute hat, sitting with her hand on her husband’s knee, both of them so friendly and chatty, telling us about the time they got stranded in Budapest because they didn’t realize that the chairlift closed at 5:00 and so therefore they were going to have to walk all the way back, but then they were able to flag down a passing car and get a lift. I got so tickled about their son-in-law (talk about dour and silent!) who sat there looking at his phone the whole way and never said a word or, as far as I know, looked out the windows. Their daughter (at least I assume that’s who she was) had had to wait for a gondola that allowed dogs. We talked briefly when we got off and then went our separate ways. I wonder how the rest of the trip went for them.
And there were lots of other people along the way: the couple who had just bought the toy store down a side street in town and with whom Jim engaged in a long conversation, the friendly woman with the Russian (?) accent at the front desk of our hotel, the couple running the bed and breakfast where we stayed our last night, the espresso-machine repairman who told us about the walking path down from the top of the gondola ride. The staff at Mouse’s Chocolate and Coffee Shop. The woman running the “San Juan Odyssey” multi-media film whose husband had taken some of the incredible pictures shown in it.We spent a fair amount of time poking around in the little shops on Ouray’s main street, one of them the Swiss Shop (which doesn’t seem to have a website). We wandered in. Behind the counter was a woman unpacking and price-tagging some stuffed animals. She didn’t seem very talkative and we walked around looking at the beautiful photographs and a pottery display. Some comment of mine elicited a response from her. Suddenly we were finding out all sorts of things. Why was there a shop specializing in Swiss items? Because many of the original miners who founded Ouray were of Italian and Swiss descent. Who had taken the photos? The owner of the shop, who didn’t believe in using digital cameras but had stuck to film. Where was she from? Switzerland, but she’d lived in Ouray for 20 years. Were the stuffed animals made by Steiff? (Which I mispronounced, but at least I had some vague idea that it was a German company and had made the first Teddy bears back in the early 1900’s, named after Teddy Roosevelt.) No, this was a different company. Steiff had gone cheap and mass- produced. On and on, with a full analysis of the different viewpoints on road repair between the cities of Ouray, Ridgeway, and Montrose. After awhile I began to get antsy, as it became clear that we could probably stay there all afternoon if we wanted to, and I wanted to get going. Some other people came in, and that interruption gave us a chance to say good-bye. But what an interesting window into the real lives of the people who actually live in this touristy place!
I used to be so anti-social that it astounds me how much I’ve changed, mostly because of being married to Jim. While my appetite for endless conversations isn’t quite as strong as his, I do find people much more interesting nowadays. The perfect evening for me when I was single was to be alone with a book. Now I’d rather be at a party, preferably one that I’ve planned and that’s at our house. I’ve thought many times that my appetite for the written word has meant that I read about what other people were doing more than I actually did things myself. Now the balance is slowly tipping in the other direction. (But don’t worry–there are still plenty of books in my life, and a book review is on tap for tomorrow.)
Such a delightful post!