Picking up where I left off in part two, we  were now in Telluride. One thing I forgot to mention in the previous entry was a funny encounter we had when we got back to our hotel from dinner.

First, I should say that for at least a month before we took this trip, I had been going over the route we would take over and over in my head.  I had researched tons of photography websites, blogs, maps, galleries, etc.  I felt really good about everything except one section– Last Dollar Road (LDR).  This is a scenic road that starts just outside of Telluride and goes over the adjacent mountains and eventually meets up with Highway 62 again.

One one hand, I have seen some of the most beautiful pictures online that were taken on LDR.  On the other hand, it is mostly unpaved, with some rocky portions that may not be so friendly to sedans.  I read dozens and dozens of reviews, guides, travel tips, ebooks and blogs about LDR, and there were many different opinions about if you could get by with just a 2WD sedan, or if you need to use a high-clearance vehicle.  The issue is, both Scott and I have Nissan Altimas, which are obviously not high clearance vehicles.  The whole road trip would include about 1,000 miles of driving, with about 990 of that being paved highways.  Given that fact, we really wanted to take one of our vehicles for gas mileage reasons.  But that 10 miles or so of beautiful LDR may be out of our reach.  After my research, my conclusion was that we could attempt to go over LDR in a 2WD if the weather was good and the road was not muddy.  So we ended up taking Scott’s Altima.  We decided that we would attempt to go over LDR, but if things looked bad, we could always turn around and go around the long way to where we were headed.

So back to the story.  After dinner in Telluride, we get back to the hotel.  As we walk into the front lobby, I see the worker at the desk, who is a guy in his mid 30s.  I figure I would ask his opinion, since he was local and would likely know LDR fairly well.  So I went up to him and asked if he thought we could get over LDR with a 2WD sedan.  After I explained it to him, he thought for a second before saying “No, I don’t think I would go over that with a 2WD.  I wouldn’t even do that in my Subaru.”  I thanked him for the advice, and then Scott and I headed for our room.  As we stepped in the elevator and the doors closed, I turned to Scott and said, “I don’t know about you, but all I heard him say was Hell Yes!”  Scott replied, “Yup!”  So it was decided, we would go over LDR in the Altima.

I will write more about LDR in the next post, but as we started on LDR the next morning, we came by this sign in the picture above.  We knew that we had to stop and take a picture of that as our trophy.

More to come…