June 25th - Turkey Creek, Colorado

The day dawned cloudy and quite cold—our hands quickly went numb while eating breakfast and Monika finally put on her gloves, which makes for somewhat awkward eating if you’ve ever tried it. On the positive side, the milk was cold! We again had to leave rather early for our next walk at a military recreation area just south of Colorado Springs, but we were happy to get in the car to get warm. Thank goodness I had slept like a log until 5 0’clock—I felt a lot better about driving back down the mountain.

We were happy to find out that this walk was only at around 6,000 feet, and the trail was quite flat and well groomed, so we didn’t have any trouble with the walking. That let us really enjoy the views of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains to the west and the plains to the east. I also spotted some nice wildflowers (weeds?) and took some photos of them as we curled around a big loop to the start/finish point.

Folks told us that the convention workshops were already starting at 10 a.m., so after the walk we jumped back into the truck for the short drive back to Colorado Springs. We had, in fact, missed the first set of 1-hour workshops, but registered in time to take in a later session on “stretching for walking”. I found out that the basic rule for stretching is that you should feel the stretch, but not feel pain, and hold it until the muscles could relax in that position. Good to know.

The afternoon session was the first big general meeting of the convention. Volksmarching representatives from Canada and Japan were there, which gave it a bit of an international flavor, and we completed the nominations for the new Executive Council for the next two years. We had a bit of a sing along when we sang the National Anthem and America the Beautiful at the beginning of the meeting, and capped it off by singing “Happy Birthday” to Nancy Stenger, the outgoing President of the AVA and a very nice person.

The keynote address discussed a new coast-to-coast American Discovery Trail, which runs over 6,000 miles from Cape Henlopen in Delaware to Reyes Point, California. One person had already jogged the entire distance, averaging over 30 miles a day! One couple our age had spent over a year backpacking along the trail and were currently in Utah on the way to California—such intrepid trekkers just put us to shame! It turns out that their children also thought they were nuts when they started the trek, which I’m guessing is a pretty common reaction to us old fogies when we set off on our travels.

But we returned to our safe and sane campground, where we tried to eat dinner in a sleet storm before finally retreating into the truck, locked all our food away from foraging bears, and pounded in the stakes yet again to keep our tent from blowing over in the night. Monika finally said she wanted to get at least a trailer before we hit the road for our next trip, and I could certainly understand her feelings.