Awesome! Relaxing! Fun!
Those are a few words that describe our little mini-vacation last weekend. We went up to Colorado, specifically to Estes Park and Grand Lake. My pictures will show that we spent a large chunk of time in Rocky Mountain National Park, also.
One interesting thing we did while in Estes Park was take the tram up some mountain (I never caught the mountain name or the tram name). Once we were up the mountain we got to feed chipmunks peanuts. Noah just loved it! It was fun watching him get so excited over something…
Another first for Noah was we went to an amusement park and Katie and I took Noah on his first Go-Kart rides. The park also had bumper-boats and a small train that we all rode on. Zachary was only allowed on the train which he enjoyed.
We left Estes Park after a couple days and headed into Rocky Mountain National Park (from now on I’ll use RMNP). We quickly drove through RMNP last summer when we were vacationing in Colorado, but didn’t stop to see anything because we were low on gas.
This year we stopped at damn near everything. A couple of my favorite things we did in RMNP this year were taking Old Fall River Road, a one-way dirt road that winds up through a forest, and taking the kids on the hike up the trail at the Alpine Center.
The hike from the Alpine Center was a little challenging. It wasn’t that long of a hike (like 40 minutes round-trip) but we were 2 miles above sea-level, and I carried a 35 pound boy on my shoulders. Katie didn’t have it any easier. She carried Zachary on her back. Zach wasn’t too impressed with the hike as he fell asleep while on Katie’s back.
We finished our trip by spending a day/night in Grand Lake at the Grand Lake Lodge. We stopped at the Grand Lake Lodge last year and said we HAD to stay there on our next trip to that part of Colorado, which happened to be just a year later. Grand Lake is a pretty little town around a lake in the mountains. Not much to do there other then relax and shop along the main/only street in the town. If there was some Java work to be done in Grand Lake I’d be moving tomorrow.
That wraps up my recap. I’ll see if I can get Katie on here to post some comments on the stuff I left out. I’ve uploaded all of our pics from the trip and tagged them a few different ways. Click the links below to check them out.
Pictures from Estes Park
Pictures from Rocky Mountain National Park
Pictures from Grand Lake
Hey Erik,
This comment has nothing to do with the post, but I can’t find your e-mail address on here so I’m just writing you here instead. I saw your question on iluvabbitatton.blogspot.com, asking how to find out what was said about you on CNN’s “Inside the Blogs.” Funny enough, I found the site today because it was the first to inform me that my site was on CNN. That guy’s got a strange obsession with the CNN reporter, but is providing a valuable service to blogs.
For future reference, CNN shows are transcribed at transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS. I looked up the show you were mentioned on, and here’s what she said: “Now, Wolf, I don’t want you to think we’re being hard on Pat Robertson here. Really we searched far and wide in the blogosphere today trying to find someone that was supporting these comments. It was very difficult. We found one, I’m not saying it was the only one out there, but the only one I could find earlier today. This is Eric Zeeburst (ph), he’s saying, can I get an Amen? We don’t want communism nearby in Venezuela.”
Can’t say I agree with your “amen,” but so be it.
Anyway, you can find it at the end of http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0508/23/sitroom.02.html
Great recap, honey! You did miss the part about as we were rushing back to Denver to catch our flight (that we ended up missing!) we saw snow in Estes Park. We kept seeing it on cars, but couldn’t figure out where it was coming from because we were just at the highest peak in the area and didn’t see any. We think that it was “lake effect” snow from the lake in Estes Park because it was only on one side of the town. But, it was cool to see snow in Colorado because we were on our way back to sweltering heat in Texas, 99 degrees on our drive home at 9 at night!
If you liked Estes Park and Grand Lake, maybe you’d like Crested Butte. Bruce Eckel and Bill Venners offer some very thought-provoking classes there during the summer months. I recommend it highly. Lots of small-town charm and lots to do. See http://mindview.net/Seminars/ObjectsAndSystems/
Howdy Ben…
Thanks for stopping by and for the recommendation. I’ll check out Crested Butte and Bruce and Bill’s class schedule.
Erik