I suppose this started out as a pretty typical trip for Corrine and I. This roughly means that we kicked a few ideas around, changed what we were doing completely, then just packed up and left with the intention of figuring out the next six days as we went. I figure the best trips and best memories are made this way plus, nothing ever goes wrong if there's no plan to compare it to...I think?
We do have an additional twist when we travel now as we'll be bringing Charlotte with us, who is two. Since we've never really traveled with her before, we had this great plan to go on a short trip to Omaha and see the zoo and/or SAC museum over a long weekend and then come home. I later suggested that IF traveling to Omaha worked well, we could see a few things and then travel on to Denver for a day or two extra. Corrine countered with "Why don't we just go to Colorado the whole time." Sold. That's how you make a plan.
We booked a hotel in Golden and got about half packed Thursday night, finished up packing and drove out Friday night shortly after work. From many other couples with kids, we learned that traveling at night is a good idea because kids trapped in a car are impossible during the day and they'll just sleep at night. We thought this seemed sensible and probable. Fast forward to 2:00am, somewhere in Nebraska, Charlotte has never gone to sleep and is still alternating between watching movies, reading books, and sorting toys. She'd actually been o.k. keeping busy in the back the whole time so we decide that we'll just be doing this during the day in the future since she's o.k. traveling for hours and we weren't real sure what would happen to her after skipping almost an entire night of sleep.
Heading out of the Des Moines area on the interstate here at about 7:30pm or so Friday night.
......and since there was really nothing else to see between the previous picture and this one, here are some mountains as we approach Denver at about 6:30am Saturday. We burned 21gal. of fuel to get from Pella to Denver so take that, silly fuel stations.
Interesting observation about roads around this area. The surfaces are, for the most part, very good but there are random holes every once in a while which are jagged broken-out spots that run 4"+ deep and 6"-12" wide. This is in contrast to the roads around home where there aren't terrible holes but the entire road surface is slightly destroyed. The interstate through Denver itself also now features jumps at the end of some bridges which made driving in feel like we must be on a rally course. I'm pretty sure the A4 caught some air under all four wheels at least once.
We drove on to Golden and a little ways past into Clear Creek Canyon to waste time until our hotel was open for doing a gear-dump in our room. We pulled off to check out the river which was running really full. I gathered from the locals that they'd had a unseasonable cold-streak with pretty regular rains for several days before we got there. I was glad we didn't bring the Alpackas - the rapids all looked like a death-trap and it was like 40°F air temp (and probably same for water temp.).
The hotel let us check in really early so we brought some stuff inside and tried to nap slightly. The napping was largely unsuccessful as Charlotte now had a non-functional sleep cycle. Since she was awake anyway, we spent the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon wandering around Denver's suburbs trying to remedy a problem where I'd left our camera at home. The plan was to just pick up a new one to replace it but I had a terrible time finding a store that had the model I was looking for in stock. After trying one place which only had a used body of the correct model and "wasn't really a Nikon dealer" I found a small store chain which showed one in inventory but they sent us to the wrong location first and then we had to travel even more. This wore us out pretty good as most of it was dense city traffic around Denver. We were successful though and have more than just cellphone pictures after today.
We ate at a fun little custom pizza shop not too far from our hotel and then went back to said hotel and proceeded to lie around for a while and make plans to not drive in urban traffic tomorrow.
Sunday morning, we drove out to Breckenridge for some sight-seeing and maybe some hiking, which also took us through Silverthorne and Frisco. We had a nice sunny morning and then some cloud cover which made it cool again today but certainly not bad.
We went through the Eisenhower Tunnel on the way. At over 11,000 feet elevation here, there's lots of snow around.
Breckenridge was pretty nice, if a little crowded (it was a weekend I suppose). I decided that it's like a really big Georgetown, which is a good thing. I'd go back again - it had a nice vibe.
We toured a bunch of shops and pet the local wildlife.
Heading back East, we stopped for a little hike at Dillon Reservoir. This was a nice area that didn't seem to be too heavily trafficked despite its close proximity to the highway.
We went back to the hotel to relax and check out the bounty from our little shopping trip. I found an interesting selection of beer in the back of a mom&pop market store. This is sort of an East-meets-West deal with the Dogfish Head being from Delaware and the Left Hand being from Longmont CO.
Today would be a big day - we went North to Rocky Mountain National Park! The park road makes only a few loops through hundreds of square miles of area so it seemed prudent to fill up with fuel. Not knowing how many more stations there may be remaining, I chickened-out and stopped at the Diamond Shamrock which turned out to be the second-to-last station we'd pass before park land. Lots of other people had the same idea and I got one gallon out of the 91 grade before it caused the pump display to blink, warn me that it was empty, and disable itself. I got four more gallons out of the 89 grade which was then flashing the same warning but we'd nearly gotten full so we left.
A highlight of this stop was seeing a Volkswagen Thing which looked to be in pretty good shape.
The views astounded everyone.
We stopped for a bit in Estes Park.
This is Lake Estes (I think?).
Shortly we arrived at the park entrance. We stopped to swap sign picture-taking duties with another couple and a random person leaving the park gave us a 7-day pass. Score!
Apologies from here on out, there are a lot of pictures for today.
Quite a few of the pull-outs looked like this with expansive valleys.
Looking for a map.
This was a trail-head which seemed popular.
There were snowy white peaks in just about every direction.
Looking for more wildlife to pet.
We were on Trail Ridge Rd. (still no map to be sure where we were going) cutting across some of the highest passes, hoping to eventually find a visitor's center.
We arrived at the Alpine Visitor Center. This is the view out of the windows from the back of the main building. There were signs inside warning that they still had no running water because all the pipes were frozen. The pass we went through to get here kissed 12,000ft.
A shot of the end of the visitor-center building and a substantial snow-drift.
You can see a few sticks in the foreground here. Above a certain elevation, the road was lined with these every so often, probably for ease of snow plowing/blowing.
The road headed back down rapidly with some switchbacks requiring near-stops.
We saw some moose in the valley at the bottom of Trail Ridge Rd.
Hard to see here but, near Granby, we went past this slightly weird abandoned looking golf-course that was just sitting along the highway.
Snacks to re-fuel us from a gas station situated between a tent-stand selling scarves and a tent-stand selling wall-ornaments and coat-racks made from antlers.
We stopped in Winter Park for some lunch/dinner. It was a typical nice little mountain town.
We ate at Deno's Mountain Bistro which was excellent.
Back to the hotel for a sunset and some sleeping.
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