Thursday, January 2, 2025

Decemberween 2024: Part 3 - The Place, and a Visit to Dolores

We all kinda arrived to the house at the same time, which is some cool stuff, as the caravans were coming from different directions. The house was located on some property nestled between Cortez and Dolores, themselves less than twenty minutes apart.

Cortez is like a large-ish small town, popping over 9000 in population just recently. It had little neighborhoods and a Safeway and even a Wal-Mart. Since the Safeway bosses bought up Vons in the recent past, shopping there was surreal, as the generic brand is the same, so seeing name brands next to the same generic as we see at home was a moment.

Camille and the twins got right to it:


The next day, Christmas Eve, we ventured into Dolores to visit with Corrie's cousin Anne, another guest at our Mexican Wedding all those years back. Now, having lived in San Luis Obispo for a time, I had the experience of living in a fictional place, as the case was made years back about the similarities between SLO and Springfield, where the Simpsons live. A few points:
  • Rolling green hills;
  • Beach vicinity but not on the beach;
  • Sun sets on the ocean;
  • Nuclear plant in vicinity;
  • Similar looks for downtown skylines;
  • Similar under-50k population sizes;
  • Both an engineering university and an ag university in town...
Even back in 1998, the local news anchor was a white dude with white hair, resembling Kent Brockman. Living in it, you kinda shrugged and said, eh, sure, sounds good.

Well, having visited Dolores, I can say I got the same feeling, only this time it was for the fictional town of South Park. Nestled between two conifer studded mountains, it had the same street layout and landmarks I remember from watching the show.

Corrie's cousin Anne has a place up steep sloping road to the top of one of the mountains, and her son took some of us on a hike to the cliff overlook, and again it reminded me of South Park:


The picture doesn't do justice to how close it all felt.

It was a great time, and eventually we made it home for Christmas Eve, hoping that the precipitation estimates and temperature guesses would work out, and we'd get a White Christmas...

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