May 31 - We get our first Colorado history lesson

We left Rocky Mountain National Park, but camped just a few miles outside along Lake Grandby. The pine beetle has really decimated large parts of the park, and a number of campgrounds had been cleared of most of their trees. The stubs left in our campground, Green Ridge, still made an attractive setting.



We headed South to get to some of the old mining towns that flourished in Colorado during the gold and silver rushes. Our first stop was Georgetown, along I-70. It went from a bustling metropolis with all the conveniences of the big city, to a town of just 200 when the silver prices plummeted. In recent times, the town had been rediscovered by preservation societies and newcomers who love the history of the area. The town is being lovingly restored.




We lucked into a museum tour of the Hotel de Paris, a flourishing bakery and then hotel of the time. Miraculously, most of the furniture and decorations had been kept in storage and restored to their former elegance. The owner of the hotel, a Frenchman Louis Dupuy with a questionable past, brought the ambiance of Normandy, France, to Colorado. Not only did we get to tour the rooms and public areas, we saw how the innards of the hotel actually worked, e.g. we went down into basement where we saw how the central heat was produced by furnance, transferring French and California wines from casks into private labeled bottles, the elegant pantries and kitchens, the secret stairways that went from level to level, and innovations like an early fire water system (the owner had tapped into the city water system), indoor plumbing ammenities, and something we had never seen before, a large desk that transformed into a bed. It seems the owner had set aside several large drawing rooms for traveling salesmen. They would conduct their business during the day, and take orders on the desks. At night, their workplace became their bedroom and the desk unfolded into a bed. Apparently, this was quite the sensation, and people from all around would flock to the hotel to see what new products were available. The salesmen were happy because they did not have to make any calls -- they just waited for business to come to them.





As we left Georgetown and started up the Loveland Pass, a huge thunderstorm, rained buckets on us. We decided not to repeat that kind of excitment on the next high pass that we had to deal with on our way to Leadville, so we stopped in Dillon, Colorado.