We moved the Airstream from the Wal-Mart lot over to a space next to Roger & Brenda’s house. Even though it’s only a hundred feet on the other side of the fence, it seems so much nicer here. We still haven’t plugged in, since I wanted to see how the solar system performs on cloudy days. (With mixed sunshine and clouds, we easily were re-charged in a few hours.)

We spent most of the day in the historic downtown of Salida. The commercial section is only about three blocks wide and five blocks deep, but it’s filled with interesting shops, parks, and restaurants. One of the interesting little features of Salida is the commercial art painted on the sides of the brick buildings. The more you look for it, the more you’ll notice. I shot pictures of at least a dozen good examples.

Wandering around, we found a 1966 Airstream Safari parked right in front of what used to be a Firestone tire shop. The owners are artists who use the building for workspace on the weekends. We told them about the upcoming Vintage Rally in Creede and they are thinking about dropping in for a day.

Kayaking along the river, downtown Salida (click for larger).

The foot of downtown is defined by the river. It’s ideal for practicing whitewater kayaking, with long gentle sections of quickwater punctuated by small drops and standing waves. I was able to get in close to the kayakers practicing flips and get some great action shots.

I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos from Salida to the Flickr photo album.

An intentional forward flip. Click for larger.
Salida is a neat place with a unique climate. Despite being at 7000 ft, it gets very little snow. The valley is surrounded on three sides by 14,000 ft mountains, which squeeze the moisture out of the air. As a result, most winters experience only a couple of good snowfalls which disappear quickly. They get less snow here than Denver or Colorado Springs, and 315 sunny days a year.

But not this week. It has been unusually wet this summer, and has been raining regularly each afternoon, like Colorado Springs was doing to us last week. We don’t mind the rain, having seen very little of it, but all the same it is hard to believe the locals’ claims that the place is normally parched, when everything here is so very green and lush now.