West stop ahead: Scenes from Durango, Colorado

We had the pleasure of staying the night in the southwestern Colorado town of Durango a few years ago on one of our long, cross-country treks and were delightfully surprised at what a cool place it is. As is the case with many of our trips, we wished we had budgeted more time to see this awesome city, with its authentic old west feel and retro vibe. Much of it looks as it would have a hundred years ago to this untrained eye, and a grizzled Walter Brennan riding down the main drag saying the word "pie-annie" instead of "piano" would not have been out of place. There are lots of amusing signs and great storefront windows to peek into. All of our usual budget motel suspects were booked the night we pulled in, so we ended up staying at the General Palmer Inn, a fabulous downtown old west hotel from 1898...the kind of place you picture Wyatt Earp frequenting. We salute you Durango...you're the rootin'-tootin'-est, six-gun shootin'-est, cowboy bootinest town this side of the Rio Grande (and I don't mean Mahatma Gandhi).

A pinch of Salt: Life imitates art in Colorado Springs, Colorado

 "White Chevy, Red Trailer" by the great John Salt, 1975, airbrushed acrylic on canvas.

 "Purple Impala", John Salt, 1973

 "Pioneer Pontiac", John Salt, 1971. These paintings are ©John Salt.

And now, my homage to the master:

"Blue and White Ford Wagon in Field"

John Salt (1937-) is an English painter who hit it big in the early 1970s with his photo-realistic paintings of decaying automobiles rotting away in fields, trailer parks and urban streets. His paintings have always spoken to me, not only for their magnificent technical craft but also for the mundane and poetically lonesome vibe they send out, depicting once-gleaming possessions of pride and status, now pathetically discarded and left to rot among weeds and debris. As I gaze out the window on long road trips, I'll often think to myself, "there's a John Salt painting". One of the most spectacular John Salt moments I've encountered happened at a campground in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The wonderfully eccentric May Museum of Natural History in The Tropics, which we've blogged about before, is on the property, and off in the distance among the Colorado pines and tall grass sits a comatose 1959 Ford Country Sedan station wagon. I actually remembered seeing this sad beauty on a previous road trip to the museum nine years earlier and was delighted to see that it was still resting in its same spot, full of melancholy ambiance.

If you're ever in the Colorado Springs area, Mr. Salt, your chariot awaits.  (Check out a nice video about the great artist here)

The arrows of my ways: the giant arrows of Mancos, Colorado

On our last big trip, we were tooling down the road in southern Colorado toward Mesa Verde National Park when we spotted an eccentric roadside attraction favorite: some really big arrows. They were attached to the Mud Creek Hogan Gift Shop property of Mancos, and while were disappointed the shop was closed, we feasted our eyes on these telephone pole projectiles, all sticking in the ground at the same angle, as if shot by a giant mutant tribe of not-so-friendly Indians from a faraway bluff in New Mexico, or maybe even regular Mexico. Big roadside geegaws like this recall my grandparents' era of road travel, when you needed some big attention-getter to pull folks off the road to buy your trinkets. And these arrows are particularly nice, with tee pees, a fake horse and a poetic stretch of land in the backyard. Do we love this place? And how. Check out some other roadside arrows we've seen here.

You oughta be inn pictures: The Movie Manor motel of Monte Vista, Colorado

Not only does the Movie Manor feature a working drive-in theater, they also still have the old-fashioned speakers you attach to your car...

...and it appears they have at least two brands. This one is an Eprad...

...while this one appears to be a Projected Sound model. Any drive-in aficionados care to enlighten me?

A working drive-in movie theater is a wonder to behold. Relics of a bygone era, they stand proudly as if to say, "Hey, everybody, I'm still here! Home theater? Ha! Is that all ya got, punk? I got chunks of guys like you in my stool!" (okay, that last line came from Phil Hartman). So we were particularly delighted when we came across the Best Western Movie Manor motel while cruising down Highway 160 in south-central Colorado. Back in 1964, the Star Drive-In opened, with a small motel where guests could see the movies from their rooms. Some time later, the Best Western chain took over and changed the name to Best Western Movie Manor and in 2003 they added a second screen for an additional 200 cars. An old self-promotional postcard has this to say about the place (thank you Roloff):

"Kelloff's Best Western Movie Manor, the world's only movie motel. A unique concept in accommodations. Rooms face a giant outdoor movie screen so you can enjoy watching the latest movies, complete with sound, without leaving the comfort of your room. Kelloff's Restaurant, next to the motel, serves breakfast, lunch and dinner daily. While you enjoy your meal, view two spectacular mountain ranges - the San Juans and Sangre de Cristos."

We were on a rather tight travel schedule, so we weren't able to take advantage of this extraordinary movie-lodging opportunity, but we did stop to snap a few pictures. And that post card copywriter wasn't just blowing smoke about the mountain range scenery being spectacular.

Be sure to check out this panoramic photo display from the motel's website.

Beautiful mountain scenery by day, and the theatrical stylings of Mr. Vin Diesel on a screen the size of a Zeppelin hangar by night, all without leaving the comfort of your one-queen, one-king or two-queen bedroom...Colorado, we like your style.

Meet the beetles: Colorado Springs' May Museum of Natural History of The Tropics

I've always been a big beetle fan.

The May Museum sits on the property of the Golden Eagle Ranch Campground and RV Park.

An Acrophylla Titan from Australia (that's my finger there for scale)

A giant centipede from Venzuela

A Goliathus Giganticus from the Belgian Congo

A Megalodon moth from New Guinea

A tarantula from South America

I can't read the label on this one...let's just call it Biggus Stickus.

Nine miles southwest of Colorado Springs, Colorado in a campground about a mile off of Route 115 sits something totally unexpected and decidedly eccentric: a Smithsonian-worthy natural history collection of 8,000 exotic insects from the far reaches of the planet. James F.W. May was an adventurer and travelled the world at the turn of the century. He passed along the "bug" for bug collecting to his son John, who was only eight when his father died of yellow fever. John amassed a collection of over 100,000 invertebrates and in 1952, he built a museum to house the collection on the family's ranch in Colorado. Today, the museum looks like it hasn't been modernized since opening: labels written by hand and old-fashioned typewriter accompany the vast selection of wild and weird creepy-crawlies encased under glass and craning lamps. The rustic Colorado locale belies the alien origins of these arachnids: there are moths from Madagascar, beetles from Borneo, cockroaches from the Congo and tarantulas from, er, somewhere beginning with a T. And, as if that wasn't already enough, they also have what eccentric roadside attraction fans pine for: a world's biggest something-or-other...in this case, a giant, Godzilla-sized Hercules Beetle next to their sign on the highway. A couple of very nice ladies that work there told me they get a lot of school groups coming through and who can blame them...there are more insects than you can shake a stick bug at and it's a place where you'll really get the most bang for your bug.