The Adventures of Reba

The sand dunes at Great Sand Dunes National Park were big and it was a tough hike up: Steep, sandy, windy, steep. We did not make it to the top 🤣 our skin is now extremely exfoliated, and everything we own is covered in sand, but it was still amazing to see! Almost hard to believe this is in Colorado 😍 We camped nearby in Alamosa, which offered beautiful views of the surrounding mountains and desert landscapes.

We spent several days at Lake Pueblo State Park enjoying the lake view, the sunsets and sunrises, and being warm again after the chill of the mountains! We saw a B-29 Superfortress make several passes overhead, as well as some helicopters and very large birds. We spent time lounging in our hammock and Beau was hamming it up lakeside!

A few more of the memorabilia from the US Olympic and Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs…

Basketball memorabilia, Nastia Liukin, Peggy Fleming, Cy Young, Miracle on ice, Dan Jansen, Bonnie Blair, Kristi Yamaguchi

Next we visited the US Olympic and Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs! I had seen a fellow traveler visit the museum and quickly added it to our must see places. In addition to tons of history and memorabilia, including an extensive collection of medals and torches, there are also several fun interactive exhibits.

Before leaving the mountains we stopped at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, where redwoods once towered over the land, now just petrified stumps, and where thousands of fossils have been found, one of the most diverse deposits in the world. In the first stump photo you may notice two dark brown spots, the remnants of a saw blade stuck in the wood when someone had the great idea to try and dismantle the stump and take it to the world’s fair. In the second stump photo you’ll notice a band around it and a structure overhead, both are there to protect and preserve what remains. Other stumps have been buried again by the park service for the same reasons.

On Saturday we visited Garden of the Gods, a free national natural landmark in the middle of Colorado Springs. It was cloudy and rainy most of the day, but we still loved getting to see the incredible rock formations, including the Kissing Camels!

Mueller State Park. Sometimes the beauty of a place will completely surprise me. We look at maps and satellite images, maybe see a couple of photos, but you can’t really get the feel of a place until you’re in it. The winding drive up and up through red rocks and ponderosa pines, the altitude and the way the clouds envelope you, the elk and the wild turkeys and the woodpeckers and the squirrels hurriedly harvesting pine cones. The temperature for us dropped from a high of 98 in Denver to a low of 38 with wind chill here, we had to turn on our heater for the first time in many months and woke to frost covering the morning. There is space to breathe, though it takes a small effort at 10k feet. The space we occupy, just temporary parking, but also home.

We left Rocky Mountain National Park and drove to Denver with a quick, and expensive, stop in Boulder - the first REI we’ve seen in 4 states!

Then we stopped and had lunch at Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre, visiting the Colorado Music Hall of Fame. We didn’t stay long, but it was cool to see some of the rock formations. We ran a couple of other errands (ham radio store for Beau, and H-Mart too!) and then headed to our campsite, where we finally got to shower after 6 days of dry camping! 🥳

Sometimes we think things like, “We’ll be near Denver, let’s go eat out and play tourists!” We get a great spot at Cherry Creek State Park in one of the suburbs, a local will marvel at how we managed that since it books out 5 months in advance. Of course there weren’t any spots on the weekend and Beau works during the week, but we could still go explore in the evenings. And then, we just don’t 😂 We enjoy the relative quiet of the park, not having to be anywhere specific at any particular time. We catch up on laundry, watch the magpies and the squirrels, and eat ice cream from a vending machine. Oh, and Beau got a haircut! That’s about it for our time in Denver 🤷🏻‍♀️ Maybe we’ll come back sometime and do all the things you’re supposed to do when you come here, but this was what we needed this time, now on to the next place!

Monday we went on a fun adventure: Driving the highest continuous paved road in North America and going to the highest visitor center in the National Park system. It is fairly winding, there aren’t any guardrails, and the drop-offs can be steep. Our first day at Rocky Mountain National Park a car went off the road and didn’t stop for 500 feet. The driver walked out, and seeing where he went over I’d say he was VERY lucky!

There are 3 main roads in the park:

1. Bear Lake Rd: Limited to 21-feet in length past the transit center, which mostly seems like a parking issue rather than a driving issue. We took the shuttle up this road.
2. Trail Ridge Rd: This is the one we drove, there aren’t any height or length restrictions, but you should still drive it cautiously.
3. Old Fall River Rd: Limited to 25-feet in length, it is steeper and curvier and gravel. We did not take that one and seeing it from the visitor center was very 😳😬

At one of the first lookouts that we approached on the Trail Ridge Rd there’s a crosswalk that goes from a parking lot to the lookout. We stopped to let a family cross, there was a car behind us, and apparently a motorcycle close behind them. When we stopped he fell, in the middle of a blind corner. Thankfully pedestrians at the lookout jumped in to help, some stopping traffic and others going to help the moto get upright again. He wasn’t in danger of going over the edge there, but it still could have been a bad situation. We had no idea what happened until we parked, got out, saw him getting upright again, and asked the family we’d stopped to let cross what had happened.

At the Alpine Visitor Center we took a small hike up and up and up the stairs to another lookout where we saw a yellow-bellied marmot, which looks a little like a beaver.

It was a beautiful drive and well worth the time, but definitely required a little extra attention!

Sunday was a rest day, filled with reading and hobbies and lounging about.

I’ve never read Hemingway before, it was an experience. I started and finished both The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway) and The Alchemist (Coelho), and also started Walden (Thoreau).

Beau is determined to perfect the art of hammocking. He googled and watched YouTube videos about it.

Beau has also recently started geocaching, including participating in International Geocaching Day on August 20 in Bismarck, ND. We’ve also successfully found geocaches at Fort Robinson State Park and Boyd Lake State Park, and unsuccessfully searched for geocaches at Fort Ransom State Park and in Cheyenne, WY. Thankfully this geocaching hobby doesn’t take up any space in the RV. However, Beau’s radio hobby does take up a bit more space than the geocaching one! Still, it was pretty cool to see all the people that could hear him broadcasting from Rocky Mountain National Park.

We have appreciated the small concession stand at our campground at RMNP, they sell sodas, firewood, and ice, but we mostly took advantage of the ice cream. “I’m here for my nightly Crunch bar,” Beau said to the little old lady running it.