|
During the night,
I awoke briefly and heard what sounded like little sprinkles of
raindrops hitting the tent. Come about 6:30 am, we started to drag
ourselves out of bed. It was still quite overcast, making for a darker
morning. It was also very cold out. As usual, Jeff was the first one
out of the tent. But this time I wasn't too far behind since we needed
to get going. I made the usual very quick run to the outhouse and
returned to camp.
As it turns out, it did not rain during the night. Here's what we saw when we got out of the tent.
It was not raindrops I had heard hitting the tent during the night, it was small snow pellets. Now we were concerned about the condition of Wolf Creek Pass and were even in more of a hurry to leave, just in case we would have to find an alternate route home. Jeff was having more difficulty breathing this morning. He was literally audibly wheezing. I figured the thicker, cold morning air had something to do with it. His doctor had wanted him to come in on Thursday, April 15, but that was the day we left town, so he scheduled his appointment for Monday, April 19. I wish he could have gotten in to see her before we left. She might have prescribed an inhaler for him that would have helped at this time. We quickly ate a breakfast of cold cereal. Then we packed away the lantern and deflated the air mattresses and threw them into the vehicle. Since we wanted to leave as quickly as possible, after pulling all the poles out of the tent, we simply wadded it up and threw it in the back of the vehicle. We would deal with folding it up properly after we got home. We made our last run to the outhouse before leaving camp.
It was so cold out that we needed to wear a hat and gloves. The only
problem is, with most of the packing we needed to do, gloves were too
bulky to be able to handle much of anything, so I ended up wearing them
only a few minutes here and there. By the time I got into the vehicle
to leave, my fingers were hurting and tingling from the cold. I had
planned to check the outside temperature reading in the vehicle when we
pulled out of camp, but I forgot to do so. I had figured, though, that
it was down to at least 32, maybe even lower.
|
