I first met the Prices last summer in Italy: a father, mother and son traveling together on the same Italy at Leisure tour as my mom and me. The first few days at Lake Como were miserable, cold and rainy, and this might be why I was drawn to them from the beginning: after a particularly nasty afternoon on the lake, Faith clambered onto the tour bus looking like she’d just been through a maelstrom. “Sorry I’m late,” she drawled in her Georgia accent. “I was having my hair done.”
Faith and Everett are retired doctors from the South who've lived in Colorado for the last 13 years; Paul is an English teacher in Columbia, SC. We had a lot to talk about with each other, and among other things, my mom and I rode in a funicolare with the Prices, and ate gnocchi and drank Chianti with them in Tuscany. I even shared a gondola with them in Venice.
If you don't know where Guffey, CO is (population: 35), don't feel bad. Even people who live there aren't certain. After our big meal, Paul did the driving and the twilight faded quickly into blackest night. Faith said about their home for the last 13 years, “You remember how to get there in the dark, don’t you Paul? Because we surely don’t.”
Faith and Everett also aren’t big on street names, preferring the landmark method of finding their way. “Somewhere up here is a sign for the Thunderbird Inn. Go slow when you see it and veer left.”
“Is there a highway number I could be looking for?” Paul wondered.
After successfully veering past the Thunderbird, the directions turned more specific. “Up here in a little while there’ll be a llama farm and then you’ll turn right. Of course you won’t be able to see the llama farm in the pitch dark, so you’ll just sort of have to go on instinct.”
Eventually we pulled onto the long and winding road that led to their multi-level home at 9,000 feet. The house, designed by Paul’s brother Charles, has panoramic mountain views from even the bathrooms and comes complete with a turret, 396 acres of rolling hills and two llamas. Because of all the dire warnings about dry mountain air, altitude sickness and accompanying insomnia, I drank three glasses of water, slathered my body in a thick layer of lemon verbena lotion, and slept like I only seem able to do when I am on vacation.
Or is it the waking up and not having my first thought be, “How many dead cockroaches today?”
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