Day 3

Beaver, Utah to Vail, Colorado

Was great little motel to stay in in Beaver last night. Always the little bits of human kindness can make or break a stay. One of the cleaning people (I later saw she had Down Syndrome) left a note saying “Welcome to Beaver! I hope you enjoy your stay!” on the room notepad. I wrote back that we had indeed enjoyed our stay because of her, with love from MnM. With a good breakfast and all packed, we decided to start a tradition of a group dance every morning before we hit the road:

We headed to the other side of town to charge up. With a quick stop for guacamole and chips and a dance with Santa:

We had an ambitious plan to get to my brother’s place near Boulder Colorado, but if you are eating guacamole and dancing with Santa after covering only 5 miles, you may not be setting up for the biggest mileage day.

We headed on and finally onto 70 and started to head direct to Colorado. I was excited to get back there. Colorado is my favorite state for sure and I had an amazing year living in Aspen when I graduated from University and wasn’t keen to join the “real world” just yet. When I left Aspen, I moved to Moscow, and the rest is history.

We stopped to charge in Richfield Utah at the best Holiday Inn Express (we weren’t even guests and they were so hospitable) in the world. If you ever find yourself in the area, stay here:

Energized from some friendly human interaction, we struck out to finally cross the border! I handed control to Mishka (my Tesla’s name ;)) and it led the way:

The territory west of the Rocky Mountains is amazing and open, but with enough rock and vegetation formations to keep you quite glued to the scenery. We pushed some solid miles till reaching Green River, UT. We stumbled upon another lovely place to get a short rest and a supercharge:

Here we opened some amazing presents from Marina!

I was determined still to reach my brother’s, but as the time ticked away and the mobile Internet signal was in and out, I decided I needed some steady WiFi to catch up on some important work tasks. It was meant to be an hour mall, supercharger, and Starbucks stop while MG works, but little did we know the excitement in store:

See above hands down the coolest way to ride around a mall ever!

Then Marina brought Nina to have her photo taken with Santa (a tradition I really don’t like for young kids — too many scared and screaming children in those pics):

By the time we left the mall, it was too late to reach my brother near Boulder. So we booked in Vail and headed that direction.

We ended at a nice hotel with crap service (the people that always make the difference) in Vail near midnight. After an unsuccessful (Vail all goes to sleep at 10/11pm) attempt to grab food, Marina and Nina went to sleep and I settled in to a few hours more of work.

Felt good to be in Colorado. Aspen would have been even better, but we need to keep moving…