Three Days Update

Hello Everyone.  It has been three days without connectivity to the internet, so I am sorry if you have been checking this blog without seeing any updates.    We have traveled from Amarillo in Texas, where we were wearing shorts and tee shirts, to the mountains of Colorado over a pass 11,300 fee thigh in quite heavy snow.  Right now I am in the public Library in a little town called Hotchkiss in Colorado, where they are very happy for me to use their internet access.

I will show a few photos from our travels over the past 3 days and hope you enjoy seeing them.This sign on the left was outside some public toilets at a rest stop in Texas as we traveled into New Mexico.  We`were very careful!

This is the front entrance to Cotopaxi School, where I spent several hours with the Superintendent and Principal, learning how their school functions.  The school has 220 students from Pre-Kindergarten to the end of High School, and is in a very isolated area.  We had to drive several hours on back country roads to get to it.  Notice the black rock cliffs in the background.

This is the junior playground for the elementary section of the school.  The big cliffs are in the background again.  They completely surround the school and you have to drive through a steep river gorge to get to the school.

Some of the children are very poor and live in houses without electricity and running water. Most are from normal houses, but are still poor.








These bison are roaming in the wild, quite close to the road.  The wooden construction in the fore ground is not a fence.  It is a stretch of construction to help the snow build up away from the road and help keep the roads open,

The deer below are also roaming in the wild.  We couldn't help thinking of that song; "Home home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play ..."

Yes.... that is snow.

This photo was taken from the front passenger side of the vehicle as we drove up

 over the Monarch Pass in the Rockies.  The summit is 11,300 feet high!  What is that in meters?

Here Mrs McLeay and I are at the Summit.  If the snow melts on the west side of this place, the water will flow all the way out to the Mississippi River and into the Caribbean Sea.  If it heads west, it will run into the Gunnison River, then into the Colorado River, and finally into the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean!

This amazing rock formation is called a "mesa."  There are hundreds of these along the way.