Educational benefits

Some people love to travel, but I am not among them. I have the good fortune to live in a town that's just the right size. Salida, Colo., is small enough that I can walk to conduct most of my routine errands, and big enough for a supermarket, library, bookstore, pharmacy and the like. America's most popular whitewater river runs right through town, we sit amid hundreds of miles of trails and back roads, and there's a row of 14,000-foot peaks just west of town.

Thus I may be the least-traveled free-lance writer in America. Even so, I do need to get out once in a while, and I do find it true that travel is educational.

For instance, I thought I knew something about rural poverty -- my county's median household income

is well below the state average -- until I spent a few days wandering around northern New Mexico.

And I'd always heard that eastern Oregon was fit only for hold the earth together, but I was pleasantly surprised by the region's beauty last summer on a road trip to visit our daughters in Bend and Eugene. More education.

This summer, my kids were coming to visit me. But I couldn't escape the travails of travel. My wife's mother's family was holding a reunion in Laughlin, Nev., which is on the Colorado River about 100 miles south of Las Vegas. Martha hadn't seen her mother or sisters for five years, and there were cousins she hadn't seen in 50 years.

So off we went, driving the 150 miles to Denver to fly to Las Vegas to rent a car to go to Laughlin. At home, we average about 10 inches of precipitation a year, which qualifies us as a high desert.

But this is damn near a rain forest compared to southern Nevada with four inches a year, barren peaks in the distance with sparse and unfamiliar vegetation along the road. And that 110-degree heat didn't drop much after sundown. It made me wonder how people managed to cross this area in the draft-animal wagon-train days, and how it could have been inhabited at all in the days before air conditioning, which must consume a fair proportion of Hoover Dam's electric production.

Anyway, I managed not to offend my in-laws and we had a good time, although I sure would have preferred to make the trip in February, when it's cold and miserable here, and fairly temperate there.

It was good to get back home, and even better that a few hours after we unpacked, our daughter Abby

arrived from Oregon along with her husband and their two-year-old son. I get to be a hands-on grandpa for a few days -- without the hassle of airports and city traffic, and maybe I'll learn something from this, too.

 Ed Quillen is a freelance writer in Salida, Colorado