Colorado's South

After the never ending breathtaking sights we got tired of the words majestic and magnificent. The third attempt to fall in love with Colorado finally worked! Beautiful mountains, rivers and cozy towns completely stole our hearts.

Life comes back to towns and everything begins to feel normal again. Lunches in small towns, walks through antique stores and people longing for small talk complete the travel experience.

As the joyful moments returned, I no longer take them for granted. While hiking in Colorado's mountains I had to let my grandmother go, step up in my role as a humble servant to my toddler's needy life and discuss the social extremities between racism, riots and endless humbleness. Valleys with cows, ranches with horses, tiny rivers, and wind through aspens flushed all the pain away but my mind keeps wandering.

So for the sake of all the real things in life, instead of only posting dreamy travel photos on Instagram, I want to discuss the real things that we notice. I want to talk about the America which nobody takes pictures of, where no one travels and where nothing actually happens - places which do not offer any tours, jobs or comfortable daily lives. Towns, where businesses left, where grocery stores offer only canned food and where you are a little afraid to spend the night cover the majority of the US map. Tasteless ads, dusty windows, junk yards and lonely girls playing next to mobile houses with only a tiny possibility to ever getting out makes me question the greatness of this country.

Endless natural resources, colorful scenes that we try to capture and send a message that we have almost been in "that Hollywood movie" do not actually tell the whole story of traveling across America. A country that sells liberal ideas, freedom and colorful signs of motels along the highways is not actually that picturesque or liberal in general.

Even remembering the Colorado Springs stay, my body shivers with disgust. We stayed in a packed RV park where RVs are stacked next to each other with a meter in between and with all the parked cars the place looked like a junk yard. We got even luckier because the campsite next to us was often used as a temporary dumping station. It was the worst RV park so far, but visually it is close to the majority of all of our stays. Usually there is no one to even have a small conversation with. On the other hand, people in Colorado seem to enjoy passing a bottle of liquor around in a circle next to their rusty RVs.

I am not saying that I do not enjoy the real country experience. I really do. But again, I just want to say that traveling does not always look like perfect pictures. Just like life (on the road) is not filled only with great careless moments of joy.

To end with a more positive note, South Colorado is very beautiful and it is one of the places really worth visiting!

P.S. If you want to ask us, why we do not take pictures of the other reality - we will tell you about it next time.