A Hippie and Her Ghosts

In Colorado

Sopris Mountain in Carbondale, CO. October 21, 2024

On my last entry I talked about arriving in Grand Junction. I got my camper checked out and everything seemed to be going really well after being on the road. I had planned to stay in Grand Junction for a little while but, I ended staying a lot longer. It was definitely good to spend time with family while I was there.

Fun times with my nephew Ashton and niece Kairi.

When I got to Grand Junction, my mom and sisters were down a vehicle, as my mom’s car was in the shop. An obnoxious deer decided to jump in front of one of my sisters when she was driving back from Cheyenne with Morgana! So I told them I would help drive people around in between me working and trying to get my camper together.

While all of this was going on, my mom ended up “resigning” from her job. It was a not so great situation for her. And I’m really impressed with how she held her composure through the whole thing. Especially while we loaded her office into my car and took her home after she had been on FMLA for her hip surgery. She was so excited to go back to work. But she ended up getting like 4 interviews and offers for work in the first week or so. She ended up taking a job in Alamosa, CO. Which is about 5 1/2hrs from Grand Junction, to the southeast.

So, once she got her car back she started going to work there during the weeks, while we tried to get all her stuff in storage/packed before the end of October on the weekends.

Some rogue corn and watermelon. The corn grew from meal for the chickens that sprouted. The watermelon was way out of the garden areas and didn’t even know it was growing anything.

Pictures from the Ghost Walk in downtown Grand Junction.

I did get to do a tiny bit of ghost hunting in Grand Junction. I met an amazing group of people called Western Slope Paranormal. I went on the Ghost Walk, the pictures above are from. I got to go to a couple of their meetings and hear about some of the places they’ve investigated. One of the meetings was at their local Elks Lodge, which itself was definitely haunted. They have events throughout the year. At another meeting we were able to team up to work on equipment. They had recently purchased an SLS Camera, they didn’t know how to use. And I had some REM Pods I wanted to make louder. I’m very proud to say we were able to help each other. And their SLS Camera was really fun to work with. After putting that together I have a much better understanding and am interested in even trying to make my own one day.

This is a coin my mom found at her storage unit. I decided to hang onto it and have it checked out. I can’t afford to take it to a real coin dealer, but we’ve found that although its not silver, as this coin from that time perioud would be, its also not a commemorative coin. Its a very heaving metal, possibly a fake, but a fake from that time period is still very significant to me. Maybe one day I’ll find out for sure.

One of my sisters’ car had been broken down for awhile. The mechanic shop was going to start charging her to keep it there unless she could get it fixed. Instead we decided to get it towed back to her house while she figures out what she’s going to do. Definitely got some new scratches on my bumper, but we made it!

Redstone, CO

I even built a Catio for Boreas! More to come on that later.

During the week and in between all of the above, almost all I did was try to work. I was in Grand Junction just over a month. I tried Instacart, Doordash, Spark. These are all apps I used and made a living off of in Cheyenne. I had used all these apps in Grand Junction on various other trips when visiting and had no problem making decent enough money. But apparently things have changed. It has been a little over a year since I had successfully used those as a means of income in Grand Junction, as I don’t get to visit often/don’t always need to work while I’m there. This time I could not make enough money… I would even drive to Walmart and sit in the parking lot to be as close as possible, and terrible, terrible paying orders, sometimes no orders at all. For hours and hours.

Boreas and I even went back to invade Great Grandma’s house so that I could try to make money around Carbondale/Aspen, which was better, but took a lot of drive time.

It got to the point I had used all the money I saved before leaving Cheyenne. I was struggling super hard to make enough money to pay my bills. And then I realized it wasn’t just me, I wasn’t going to be able to make money here, and now I didn’t have enough money to go anywhere else. Not reasonably. I have probably another dozen work apps, but I was getting nothing on those in that area. I kept checking them though, and would see work off to the east and west of Colorado.

And so finally I just decided to take what little I had and packed up, and Boreas and I hit the road heading West.

More to come on that soon.