Rocky Mountain High

Hey everyone!! I hope you're all enjoying your summer! Remmie, R3, and I spent the week leading up to the 4th of July in Colorado, so I wanted to do a recap before I forgot everything ;-)

We left on Sunday morning and drove to Kansas City, where we spent the day at the Schlitterbahn Waterpark.  Remmie's sister, brother-in-law, and niece were in the area for a softball tournament that weekend, so they met us there for some fun in the sun before they made their trek back home.  That night, we stopped for some good ol' KC BBQ before hitting the road again.  We stayed the night in the middle of Kansas before continuing our long drive to Colorado the following morning.

Are we there yet? Where are the mountains??

Our first night in Colorado, we stayed in the Denver area.  After checking into our hotel, we ate supper at Casa Bonita and checked out some of the other activities there.  Afterwards, we headed to a nearby movie theater to see Jurassic World -- little did we know how much dinosaurs would be involved in our vacation!  My phone was dead at this point from using it for GPS, so I don't have any pictures from this night :-(

(Side note: We actually stayed in Aurora, which is just outside of Denver.  I thought that town's name sounded familiar for some reason.  I didn't realize till after we got back that's where the movie theater shooting was in Colorado...and that's the same town where we saw a movie!!  Fortunately, it wasn't the same theater but I about had a heart attack when I realized that was the same town.)

The next morning, we stopped at Red Rocks Park and Ampitheatre for a short hike.  On our way to the park, we saw a sign for a building that had dinosaur fossils in it - so of course, we had to stop since we had just seen Jurassic World the night before.  We don't see or hear much about dinosaur fossils out here in Illinois, so I didn't realize how popular they were out there.

Remmie had been having issues with his eye being irritated, so he made an appointment with an eye doctor that afternoon. We hiked one of the short trails at Red Rocks and took a ton of pictures before his appointment.  This was my first "real" experience in the mountains, so I was loving all the views!

After lunch and the eye doctor, we got back on the road and headed down to the Colorado Springs area.  We chose to take the scenic route through the mountains and down the winding roads, and it was so beautiful!  We rented a cabin from Colorado Mountain Cabins in Woodland Park, and that town is such a cute little touristy area with a great view of the Pikes Peak area.  We arrived at the cabin, unpacked, explored the property a little bit, and then did a little grocery shopping before relaxing in the cabin for the rest of the night.

My bedroom had a foosball table!

The view from the balcony in my bedroom.

 

That's Pikes Peak waaayyy back there!

Wednesday morning, we had reservations with the Academy Riding Stables to go horseback riding through the Garden of the Gods.  We didn't take any cameras with us in case we dropped them, but we enjoyed our ride.  Dan, Rosetta, and Copper (our horses) did great.  I think Remmie was the biggest person in our group, and he definitely got the biggest horse!  Dan was huge!!

After our horseback rides, we drove through the Garden of the Gods and stopped to have lunch in one of the picnic areas.  The little critters there must be used to all the visitors, because they were not afraid to get close to us in hopes of getting some food.

We had a chipmunk at our cabin that we named "Chippy," so we said this was his cousin "Skippy."

That afternoon, we went to Cave of the Winds to go spelunking and ziplining.  R3 really enjoyed the cave tour, but we couldn't convince him to zipline across the mountainside with us ;-)

Every time we drove through Woodland Park, we had to go by the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center.  When we left the Cave of the Winds, it was still a little early in the afternoon, so we stopped to check out the Dinosaur Resource Center.  We took a tour and R3 soaked it all in, asked tons of questions, and even made a friend, Kyle, who was visiting all the way from South Africa!  It started storming pretty badly while we were there, so we hung out for a little while after the tour was over and it was really cute watching the 2 boys interact with each other - and listening to Kyle's fun accent!

That night, we stopped for some more BBQ (R3 loves ribs, so he's always in the mood for BBQ) because we didn't want to grill out in the rain.

Thursday, we visited Pikes Peak!  We chose to drive up Pikes Peak Highway instead of taking the Cog Railway up to the summit, and I'm so glad we did!  It was pretty scary at times (I was freaking out and literally had tears in my eyes at one point when we were driving down a stretch of the road that had a huge drop-off and no guard rails - I guess I don't trust Remmie's driving, because I felt like we were going to plummet to our death...ha!), but the views were gorgeous, we saw some fun wildlife, and we were able to stop along the way to get out, take pictures, and even play in the snow :-)

I wrote "LYNN 2015" in the snow.

Making a snow angel - in July!

See that winding road down there?  That's what we drove up!

Bighorn sheep

After our visit to Pikes Peak, we explored Manitou Springs, another little touristy town at the base of the mountain.  That night, we grilled supper at the cabin and then spent the night playing some epic games of foosball (since my room had a foosball table in it)!  Oh, and we spotted a deer right outside of our cabin!!

On Friday, we were originally going to go into Colorado Springs to visit the Olympic Training Center and the Air Force Academy, but we decided to spend some more time exploring the great outdoors.  So instead, we went to Mueller State Park to do some hiking and then visited the Florissant Fossil Beds.  We thought the Fossil Beds might be more dinosaur fossils, but we were a little disappointed when we got there and found out it wasn't.  The main attraction there was a bunch of giant petrified redwood tree stumps.

That night, we grilled up some steaks at the cabin and then played more games.  It stormed pretty good again that night, but we saw the most vibrant rainbow ever afterwards! R3 also lost a tooth that night - apparently it's becoming a vacation tradition for him.  We discovered that Jaws was on TV that night and R3 had never seen it before, so we all chilled out on the couch to watch that for the night and hoped we might see some fireworks through the huge windows in the living room of the cabin.

The next day was Independence Day!  We had plans to go whitewater rafting that afternoon, so we had some time to waste that morning.  We ended up driving back through the Garden of Gods to climb around and take more pictures, and Remmie wanted to stop back at the souvenir shop before we headed out of town.  We made it to Lost Paddle Rafting just in time to eat a quick lunch and rent some wet suits for R3 and me.

The view of Pikes Peak from the Garden of the Gods

I didn't realize that area of Colorado was considered a desert.  However, they had been experiencing unusual amounts of rain lately, so the water level on the river was higher than normal.  It rained every afternoon that we were there, including the day when we were on the river.  R3 and I were glad we rented wet suits, because that water was super cold and the rain was coming down hard at some points!  We had so much fun though, and even our guide said it was a trip to remember :-)

After we got changed into some dry clothes, we headed down the road to Royal Gorge Bridge, the world's highest suspension bridge.  We thought it was silly to pay money to walk across a bridge, so we just took some pictures and then hopped back on the road.  We had plans to watch fireworks that night in Cripple Creek, and we drove through some really pretty countryside to get there.  It made Remmie and I start dreaming about someday owning a ranch out there.

I had to take a picture of this sign to send to my parents :-)

When we got to Cripple Creek, we started walking around to find somewhere to eat.  I was trying to look up reviews for nearby restaurants on my phone and literally walked right into a pole...ha! I promise I was not drinking ;-)

Cripple Creek is an old mining town that is now booming with tons of casinos.  We ended up eating at a restaurant in the Century Casino called Mid City Grill, and I think we all agreed that it was the best meal we'd had on our whole trip!

We had a lot of time to spare before it was dark enough for fireworks, so we walked around town a bit and checked out some of the mining stuff.  We stopped at a gift shop too to get ice cream, and I found the card below that I had to take a picture of to send to Jessica and my mom...haha!

Then we headed back to our rental car, which we had conveniently parked at the top of a parking garage - a prime spot for watching fireworks!

Our last night in Colorado went out with a "bang!"

On our last morning in Colorado, Remmie and I got up early to watch the sun rise from the cabin deck.  We decided to get in the car and drive around to get a better view and ended up spotting 2 fawns nursing on their mama.

It was the perfect way to end our vacation! :-)

(P.S. I promise R3 was on this trip with us.  Since he's not actually "my" child, I avoid posting any pictures of him online out of respect for him and his parents.)