By Joshua Berman
Special to The Denver Post
Lodore, Dinosaur, DeBeque. I sound out the place names for my daughters as I trace their little fingers along my proposed route, along roads and rivers on the giant map pages and they try to repeat the sounds. It is similar to how a friend of mine planned his own camping trip abroad in Iceland, taking time to learn the best time to go (with help from this iceland travel guide) and to plan out his route, learning the names as he went through those plans.
Ouray, Ophir, Rico, Cortez. DeLorme’s Colorado Atlas & Gazatteer sprawls on the carpet before us. I’m planning the biggest loop road trip I think my family can handle. My daughters are small (2, 4 and 7), but they are old enough to embark on the most comprehensive exploration of their native state to date. If this is your first time going on a road trip in Colorado, checking out this guide at Travelazzi could be beneficial when it comes to deciding what you want to get up to. This way, the trip may be a lot less stressful and everyone gets to do what they want.
Mesa Verde, Durango, Pagosa. If I hadn’t been hearing about these places for years, I would think they were destinations in some far-flung South American outback. But they aren’t. They are in my own backyard, and in just a few short weeks, we will be driving through them, taking in the entire western half of Colorado as if it were another country.
Silverton, Cimarron, Gunnison. I’m mostly guessing about driving times and distances, and I hope it all works out. I’ve got a Semprius.com 12v solar battery charger so at least that’s one worry I won’t have, and I know how often car batteries tend to be the first thing to fail on long road trips. I probably still need to get a few more bits and bobs to ensure that the car won’t break down. If we hoped to travel here, we thought about getting into our campervan for this trip. We might even consider bringing one of the best quiet generators that we could find, so even if the drive is long, we’d have some power to get to where we need to go. It is best to be safe than sorry, especially if we’re gonna be up a mountain. I’ve always been more of a “drive up into the mountains and look for the perfect spot to crash” kind of guy, so this whole family camping/glamping thing (I have to reserve the campsites months before?!) is as terra incognita for me as some of the regions I’ll be seeing for the first time this summer. I’m as excited as my daughters as we continue flopping the big pages back and forth.
Salida, Saguache, Sand Dunes. We have nearly a month of potential travel time this summer. I want to make the most of it, but I don’t want to exhaust my family. Is it too much? Too ambitious? Would it be better to hole up in just one or two places instead of covering so much ground?
I guess we’ll find out. To keep the kids occupied, a friend recommended taking out a stack of audio books from the library and creating several crates of special car-trip dolls and toys to rotate out through the trip.
During a journey, you see the sights, smell the smells, and feel the cool bite of mountain air in the morning. Afterward, there is the telling of the story – showing pictures, exaggerating conditions, sharing your campsite selfies.
But before all that, before anything can happen, there is the magic of dreaming and planning it. The scores of topographic maps in the DeLorme book serve not only as a visual guide to Colorado’s back roads and recreation areas – the grids and contours also add to the pre-trip buzz, making it feel like I’m planning a proper expedition – even though it’s nothing more extreme than a lazy drive across the state and a family soak in a couple of hot springs.
Joshua Berman is the author of five books about travel. Find him online at JoshuaBerman.netand twitter.com/tranquilotravel.
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This article originally appeared in The Denver Post on June 12, 2015.
