August 24-Day 7 of Vacation

We got up and packed up around 8am this morning. We went into town and ate at our favorite breakfast joint, the Egg & I. Then we finished up our souvenir shopping. I got some pictures of some flowers for my mom. It was the end of the season, so all the stores were having sales. Then we headed out of town. We stopped at the overlook to Estes Park.

Then we headed home. We stopped in Limon for lunch. We found this awesome Mexican joint called Jenny’s. This was the best Mexican food we have had our whole vacation. The place was small, but the food was authentic or at least awesome. If you are ever in Limon, check out Jenny’s. It is on the main street.

Then we went down the road to the truck stop. That is where Justin noticed the front right tire was flat. Somewhere between Denver and Limon we must have hit something, because we had a small hole in the sidewall. We found a NAPA and they went to repair it. They said it was in the sidewall and since his tire is speed rated so they couldn’t patch it. They called their sister store in Flagler and was still not able to find a tire. We were debating our options when they were able to locate a used tire that was the same size. Sounds like we won’t be staying at the Bates motel here in Limon. They are mounting the tire as I type and hopefully we will get on our way soon. They don’t have a waiting room here so I am doing my blogging sitting on top of a huge Arctic Cat and it is raining like crazy outside. It wouldn’t be a vacation without adversity.

August 23-Day 6 of Vacation

Today we a pretty busy day.  We got up.  Justin ran. Then he came back and made breakfast.  Then we headed into town.  We checked out the Estes Park visitor’s center and picked up a few brochures on some stuff to do today.  We headed to the Stanley museum, but it was closed. So, we decided just to walk thru town.  We went to the heritage festival for a little bit.  We got some fresh squeezed lemonade and watched a reenactment of a cowboy shootout.  Then we wondered thru town.  I picked up some t-shirts. 

 

We walked all the way to the west end of town and back.  We ended up eating at Ed’s Cantina.  It was much better than the Grumpy Gringo.  Estes Park redeemed itself in Mexican food. Then we went to the Stanley museum.  Earlier, we had made an appointment for a couples massage.  That was pretty relaxing after the week we have had.  We are both very sore from all the hiking yesterday.

After our massage, we went to the Estes Park museum.  It was small, but it had a lot of cool history stuff from the city.  While we were looking for the museum we finally found Samson.  Samson was a local elk that was killed by a poacher in 1995.  I had been looking for him all week.  I had read the story in one of the books I purchased. The locals donated a bunch of money and put up this statue to remember Samson.

Then, we headed to the aerial tramway, finally. I have a little issue with heights, so once we got on this little cart that took us to the top, it was a little scary.  However, it has some very awesome views.  Go figure, the day we finally get to go up there, it is stormy and hazy. Once we got to the top, we were immediately greeted by a chipmunk. He was expecting us to have some peanuts.  They sold them at the store up there, so we got a scoop. There were these little chipmunks everywhere.  With all the people feeding them peanuts, I can’t believe these things don’t weigh 500 lbs.  Some of them would come right up to you and take the peanuts from your fingers.  We were told by our wrangler on the horseback ride a few days back, that these little creatures carry the plague. So, as these little guys were taking the peanuts out of my fingers, I was a little nervous.  One of them grabbed my finger with his cute little claws while taking a peanut.

After the tram, we headed to dinner.  We ate at Peak to Peak.  It was pretty decent.  Again, I ate myself miserable.  Tonight, we are just gonna veg out.  Tomorrow morning we have to leave and head back home.  We still have some souvenirs to purchase, so we will hit the town again in the morning.  We haven’t began packing or anything yet. That’s about it for our vacation.  Now we have to go back to the real world and go back to our regular lives.

Remember to check out “My Pictures” for all the photos from our vacation.

August 22-Day 5 of Vacation

Today, Justin decided to get up and run 2 miles.  I decided not to go because I knew we would be getting enough exercise on the mountain hiking today.  Then we decided to go back to one of our favorite places for breakfast, The Egg and I. It was super yummy, again.  They have the best ranch potatoes.  It was so good that we got some of them to go.  That is what we will make breakfast with tomorrow.

After  breakfast, we headed into Rocky Mountain National Forest.  We decided to see Alberta falls, so we had to go to the Glacier Gorge trail head.  However, the parking lot was full.  Then we went to the Bear Lake trailhead. The ranger at the entrance told us this parking lot was also full.  We had to go thru it to turn around.  As we were driving out, a car left.  Bear lake trailhead isn’t exactly where I wanted to start, but it all goes to the same place.

So we headed out toward Alberta Falls.  The trail was not as challenging as we would have liked.  It was very well marked and flat. Once we began hearing running water, we got off the trail and headed toward it.  We found a nice little creek (Glacier Creek). We followed it along a sloped and rocky trail until we came to Alberta Falls.  Alberta falls is a 25ft cascade in Glacier Creek. We hung out there for a while and took some pictures. Then we headed out to find the original trail and see where it takes us.  We were trying to make a big loop back to Bear Lake trailhead so we didn’t have to double back on any trails.  We found tons of great scenery.  It seemed like no matter where we went, we were going up. This trail became more technical.  There were more rocks and the trail was narrower.  If you fell over you’d probably fall to your death.  Once we got to “The Loch”, we did a map check.  Well, somewhere we had chosen the wrong path. We had to backtrack from the Loch and head toward Bear Lake via an unimproved trail.  However, I believe if we hadn’t gotten lost we would not have seen some really great views. Like in this picture.  Behind us in the Chaos Canyon Cascades Once we got on the right trail it was more uphill, rock climbing, and root steps.  There were tons of varmints on these trails.  We saw lots of squirrels, chipmunks, a woodpecker, and another marmot. We finally made out way back to the Bear lake trailhead.  I was ready to get my shoes off.  We had hiked 7.5 miles in almost 5 hours and reached a max elevation of approximately 10,200 ft. I had originally estimated a 4 mile hike. We were both extremely dirty, so we headed back to the cabin to clean up for dinner.

Tonight we went downtown to Poppy’s.  It is a pizza joint in an outdoor square.  There was a lady playing her guitar and singing in the mini amphitheater.  The pizza at Poppy’s was good.  However, we have left overs.  Now we have BBQ left overs and Pizza left overs and we leave Monday morning. Then Justin and I took a walk on the river walk.  It was a gorgeous night. We decided to go to the bakery that I have been wanting to go to.  I got cinnamon apple pie and Justin got Key Lime. Mine was good.  It would have been better if it were warm.  The apples were sliced really thin, just how I like them. Then we went to Starbucks and got something to drink so we would sit out on their patio tables.

That completed day 5.  Not sure what we are doing tomorrow.  I know we want to go into town and check out this Heritage festival.  We need to pick up our souvenirs that we’ve been scouting out all week. There are some museums I want to check out.  We still want to go on the aerial tramway.

I have been uploading all our vacation photos to my Picasa account.  That means if you want to see the entire trip, click on My Photos on the right hand side of the page.

August 21-Day 4 of Vacation

We got up early today because we had to dead to Fort Collins which is about 1 hr away.  This is where we did our water rafting out of. There were approximately 24 of us. We go suited up in our life jackets and helmets.  I didn’t know what to expect on the trip so I didn’t take my camera.  I wish now that I would have bought a waterproof camera.

After getting loaded up into a big yellow school bus, we headed to the put in spot.  The river we are rafting on today is called the Cache la Poudre River.  It was down substantially from the more exciting June and July months. Our guides name was Dave.  I would guess that he is close to my age. He said he calls North Carolina home only because he went to school there.  Other wise he has lived in at least 18 places for more than 6 mos.  How exciting would that life be?

We had 4 other people in our raft.  We kept getting stuck on rocks because the water level was so low.  There were some pretty exciting times.  For a first timer, it was probably perfect. Next time I’ll go in June or July.

The water was freezing cold.  Dave said this is the warmest it gets.  We stopped at the swimming hole to play in the water.  There was just one other couple playing in the water and they were from Wyoming.  Then Justin decided it would be funny to throw me over his shoulder and toss me in. It wasn’t cold, it was freaking cold.  But, we pressed on and got back into our boats and headed to the pull out point.  It was a very scenic ride.

We got out of the river, loaded back into the yellow school bus, and headed back to town.  Our guides were very funny.  They said they have one more week of the season.  Once we got back to the business and got changed, we went inside to check to the pictures they took of us.  I found 4 that I liked.  They will be e-mailing them to me today or tomorrow. Then we took of our guides advice and headed into town to eat at Cooper Smith’s.

After lunch, we headed home. I slept in the car on the way home.  When we got home, I sat on the deck and read while Justin slept on the couch.  After our time of relaxation, we got up and around for dinner.  We decided to go to Smokin’ Dave's BBQ.  It was very good.  I don’t know how it rates to Hog Wild, but it is right up there.  They also had the best mashed potatoes.  We even got a side order of them to-go.  Then, we decided to come home and veg out.  We watched some preseason football.  The Cowboys were playing Tennessee.

We haven’t quite decided what we are going to do today.  Estes Park is having their Heritage Festival today and tomorrow.  We will probably check that out.  We want to do some more hiking.  We’d like to check out the aerial tramway. We only have 2 days left before we head home.

August 20-Day 3 of Vacation

Today, after Justin and I ran our 1.5 miles.  We got perty’d up and headed out to explore Rocky Mountain National Park.  We took the Old Fall River Road which was the first motor route to cross the Rocky Mountain National Park.  It was built between 1913 and 1920.  It is a one lane dirt road that runs for 9 miles following the steep slope of Mt Chapin.

The first stop on our drive was Alluvial Fan.  This was created during the Lawn Lake flood in 1982. We climbed all the rocks to the top of the falls.  We saw a small chipmunk on the way down. 

The next stop on our drive was Chasm Falls.  This is a 25ft water fall.  After that, we climbed our way up the narrow road thru some hairpin turns.  We eventually reached 10,000 ft.  The scenery up there was beautiful.  Mostly just trees and mountains as far as you can see.  It was kind of hazy today, but we still got some good views. I took my GPS watch, so I was able to keep track of our elevation the whole trip.

We did some pretty good hikes.  Some climbed 200ft.  The air is very thin at 11,000 ft.  Some of the hikes really sucked on the way up.  Down wasn’t too bad.  We saw a yellow-bellied marmot on one hike. Even though the signs say “do not approach the animals.  You may be gored”, Justin got as close as possible to the creature.

At the end of Fall River road was the Alpine visitors center.  It is at 11,796 ft.  Lucky for us it had a cafe since I didn’t prepare for the day well enough to pack food and beverages.  We both had a Nathan’s chili dog.  It was pretty yummy.  We bought some souvenirs while we were up there.  Then we hiked to the top of the mountain that was there.  We reached 12,000 ft at the top.

Then we cruised back on the Trail Ridge Road. On the way, we saw a bunch of herds of elk.  It was just like the Discovery channel.  There was a herd of does and one buck.  We rounded one corner and saw this very large herd.  They didn’t seem to afraid of us either.  The females got very close to the crowd that had gathered along side of the road.

By then, we were pooped.  We headed home and got ready for dinner. We decided to eat at a place called Grumpy Gringo’s.  We realized why the Gringo was grumpy.  The food was not very good.  I guess that serves me right for saying we hadn’t had a bad meal yet.  After dinner, we came home and hit the hot tub.  Now we are just laying around being lazy.

Tomorrow, we are headed to Fort Collins for our white water rafting experience.  That is all we have planned for tomorrow.  I’d like to try to get to the Stanley Hotel museum and the airway tram that afternoon or evening.

August 19-Day 2 of Vacation

Today we didn’t really do too much in the morning. After we got up and around, Justin and grabbed my laptop and headed into town for breakfast. We ate at this place called the Egg & I. Very yummy.

Then we walked around town some more. This place is extremely pet friendly. Dogs can go in to most of the stores downtown. They have buckets of water outside their shop for dogs. Samson would have loved it here, however, the 9 hr drive would have been miserable for all of us. We checked out some more stores. We don’t want to buy our souvenirs till a little later into the vacation, but we are keeping track of where all the good stuff is. We mostly spend our money in the ma and pop snack shops with homemade ice cream and chocolate candies.

We came back to our cabin and changed for our horseback ride. We spent some time playing in the river. We took some pictures of our cabin. Then we headed for the stables. After spending a few minutes lost, we finally found it. It is west of town and right up against a mountain. We checked and and I got Cinder, a black horse, and Justin got Silverado, a brown horse. They kept telling Justin to keep Silverado at least a horse length away from Cinder. We found out later that Cinder has been having some attitude problems. He seems to like to kick at the horse behind him. Our wrangler said he is just grumpy because its the end of the season.

This was no Kansas ride where you cruise down a flat dirt street, then they parade you around a small pasture so that you just get to ride a horse. Our first steps were straight up the mountain. There were rocks and tree roots the horses had to maneuver around. It didn’t take long before we were seeing the most beautiful views from this mountain. There were also little creatures following us around. This is a picture of a tiny ground squirrel of some sort. Our wrangler told us they carry the plague. Not so cute anymore, huh? It was only Justin and I on our ride. Our wrangler said it has really slowed down in the last week for them. We got to a point up in the mountain where you could look out and see the continental divide. We tried to get our horses together for the picture, but mine was very stand-offish.

So, going up was pretty exciting, but you have to remember, the steep climbs we encountered on the way up were cool, however, we have to go back down those steep climbs. She told us as we were going down things called “the devils staircase” and “slippery rock”, to lean back, grab the saddle horn, squeeze your thighs and don’t stand up in the stir-ups, or you could go straight over your horse’s head. This was definitely the worse part. My horse didn’t take anything easy. It was like riding in a jeep straight down the mountain. Cinder, would not do anything I told him to. He took me under a tree one time. I had to do the limbo on the saddle to get under it. Then on the path where she said we had to take it one at a time, I pulled back as hard as I could to stop him, but he was going with Hondo (the wrangler’s very large horse). Speaking of Hondo, he had gas and with every step he farted right into my horses face. I personally thought it was the funniest thing ever. He farted the whole way and I laughed every time. We also ran into another creature along the path, a coyote. Our wrangler said she thinks he’s looking for the two baby deer they have up there. He’s kind of hard to see in this picture, but he looked really close when we saw him. We did the two hour ride so we spent 1 nice hour riding up the mountain and 1 horrible hour going down it. I took lots of pictures of the views, but they don’t do it justice at all.

After our horseback ride, we went back to our cabin to change and get the horse stench off of us. We got all cleaned up and went to a steak joint. We both had prime rib and it was super yummy. We haven’t eaten at a bad restaurant yet. After dinner, we decided we were both pooped. We headed back to the cabin to relax. Then we decided to check out some of the trails around our cabin. So, we changed back into hiking gear, grabbed our walking sticks and headed out.

We only found about 1 or 2 marked trails. So, we started hiking. These trails were along the river and straight up a mountain. The trail was about a foot wide and if you slipped, your happy ass was rolling about 100 ft down a mountain into the river and hitting every tree and rock down. Luckily, we had our walking sticks. We found some cool rocks and began climbing to them. We tried to get some pictures, but it was getting dark and my camera was not working out for us. So, before it got too dark we headed back down to the cabin. We stopped at the wood swing they have around the outdoor fire pit. It was so nice and peaceful out. After our hike, we went back to our cabin and chilled for the rest of the night. It was kind of hard to sit around, mainly because my ass was getting sore from my horseback ride.

Today we are traveling on the scenic Trail Ridge Road. I got up early today and made coffee…mainly cuz I can. I’ll let Justin sleep in a little bit. Eventually, we will head into town so I can upload this thing. Remember, I don’t have internet or cell phone access at the cabin. So, if you call or e-mail me, it may be a while before I respond.

I got Justin up around 8am. Then he decided we needed to go for a run. So, we suited up and headed out on this narrow, curvy road we stay on. We started at 7390 ft elevation. We ran downhill for .75 miles, then back uphill another .75 miles back. We did it in approximately 18min. That may seem like a long time for 1.5 miles, but it is hilly and the air is thin up here. Now Justin is going to make me breakfast.

August 18-Day 1 of vacation

We got everything packed up the night before. I was expecting to leave pretty early. Since I had stayed up all day I was pooped by about 8pm. So, I think I went to bed around 8:30pm. Justin however, wasn’t able to sleep. He said he took a 2 hr nap. When I got up around 5:30 am we decided to load up and head out.

We hit Cracker Barrell in Park City first. Then we were in route to Estes Park at about 6:30 am. The drive thru western Kansas and eastern Colorado was as boring as expected. Once we hit Denver, at around 1:30pm, it started pouring on us. We made our way thru Denver in the rain. Then as we got close to Estes Park, as we were driving thru Big Thompson Canyon, it started raining again. The scenery was beautiful. Large rock formations.

We pull into Estes Park. It wasn’t as busy as I was expecting. I think most families have already had their vacation for the summer and are getting their kids back in school. We found our cabin 3 ½ miles east of town, right on the Big Thomson River (or creek as I would call it). Our cabin is in a small valley between two large mountains. There are tons of trees. Our cabin has a balcony that is right over the “river”. It is also much larger than I expected, however, they didn’t advertise that it is 10 ft off the road that goes into Estes.

Our first night, Justin and I went into town to check out some shops and get dinner. We were doing some shopping, and going into all the candy shops. Then, I just got tired. We decided to eat and go home. We went home and were in bed by 9:00.

We don’t have any wireless service here, on our cell phones or our laptop. I will try to write my blog up at night, but I probably won’t be able to publish it till the next morning. Today, I got up around 6am. I decided to go outside onto our deck to enjoy the morning, the “river”, and the great outdoors. However, I mostly get traffic and it’s freaking cold out.

Today we don’t have any real plans for the morning. We go horseback riding at 1:30 for 2 hrs. Hopefully we will be able to walk tomorrow.