Many of you only know South Park as an adult cartoon and may not know that it is a real place (kind of like how I didn’t know Coney Island was a real place and not just a hot dog stand in the mountains, but that’s what I get for growing up in Colorado all my life!). This past weekend we had the chance to stay in South Park, CO with our friends. It is literally a vast, flat area, a mountain park sitting between mountain ranges. It’s ideal ranch land. The one similarity it does have to the cartoon is the remoteness from other towns. Fairplay is nearby, but it has maybe one grocery store and a post office. About a 1 ½ hour drive from Denver, we set out to find our friends’ land. Locating land is different from locating a house. And, in South Park there are not a lot of landmarks. With directions to look for things like a canoe sticking out of a windmill, a fake buffalo on the side of the road, and a Twinkie on the hill, we could only hope we would be able to find the correct piece of land before dark.
So, we set out on our treasure hunt determined to reach our destination. The last stretch of the road was the most difficult and rugged. It was 12 miles of dirt, washboard roads. For those of you who have never experiences washboard roads, they are like being a piece of fabric dragged like laundry across a century-old washboard. There is no rest from the evenly spaced ripples and bumps. To this day I still have not figured out how the washboard roads are actually created, but I do know they are a big pain on which to drive. They are an anomaly in the non-paved road world and wreak havoc on your vehicle. The bigger the vehicle the more distinctly you feel the bumps.
We approached the road initially going too fast at 20 mph (the speed limit was 45). After hitting one too many ruts we finally slowed down to 5 mph inching down this terrain at a snail’s pace. Short of stopping this speed was the only way we could feel confident that our rig would not shake apart and break everything in the RV. Just as we reached the last turn to our destination I experienced my heart jump into my throat. I thought we had cleared the left turn when I felt the back right tire sink down into the drainage ditch on the side of the road and the front driver’s side rise up into the air. The RV felt as if it was leaning and the right side heading towards the ground. It happened in slow motion. I was sure we were going to tip over . I slammed on the gas hoping to have enough momentum to pull the rig out of the ditch. Miraculously, the front end descended back to earth and the back rose up from the depths of drainage. Breathe. I was shaking so hard that I had to stop and regain my composure before heading down the road. I didn’t see that one coming. It was as if the earth opened up and sucked my back tire down into it. That was one driving incident I hope never to repeat.
The more I drove on these back roads, the more I discovered that they were as soft as a sandy beach and even a minor slope could make me feel like we were going to topple over. So, in hindsight my spatial judgment was not wrong and I didn’t actually fall into the ditch. The slight incline near the edge made me feel like we were tipping, but in fact, we were still on the road. Live and learn. But, for now, I’ll stick to the middle of the roads on which I travel!
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