The Adventures of Reba

We took a free shuttle from Rocky Mountain National Park to the gateway community of Estes Park, CO. So glad we did this - driving and parking in town with the RV this weekend would have been a nightmare! 😳😬

Technically this is the Hiker Shuttle, but if you have camping reservations in the park then you don’t need the Hiker Shuttle reservations ($2). Just let your driver know and be sure to catch the last bus back.

We were surprised to be the only ones on the bus back into the park, but glad they had added more buses for the holiday weekend so we could stay in town longer!

We took the Estes Park Tramway to the top of Prospect Mountain, had burgers at Penelope’s Old Time Burgers, and visited several of the town’s shops.

This is the line to get into RMNP about an hour after timed entry ended for the day. When we went into the park during timed entry the line was half as long. It was also a Thursday vs a Saturday, but so far we’ve had good experiences with timed entry at the parks we’ve visited that have it implemented.

On our first full day in Rocky Mountain National Park we took a short hike to and around Sprague Lake, then took a couple of the park’s shuttles to get to and hike around Bear Lake. Luckily we avoided some of the crowds and the thunderstorm that later rolled through! 🍀⛈

A compilation of videos from our drive into Rocky Mountain National Park via Roosevelt National Forest, which gave me greater appreciation for why they’re called The Rockies!

Hello from Rocky Mountain National Park! We spent most of the first evening here reading books among the trees 🥰 Looking forward to exploring the park more over the next several days!

Hot days and cool nights, a lovely lake view, a beautiful sunset, and a place to call home for a few days.

When travel days land on the weekend, you make ALL the stops! We visited THREE national monuments on our way to Cheyenne: Scotts Bluff National Monument, Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, and Fort Laramie National Historic Site!

We didn’t get to drive up to Scotts Bluff because we’re a tad too long and we weren’t prepared to hike it, so we snapped some photos and toured the exhibits before heading on our way. At the Agate Fossil Beds we saw skeletal remains from Miocene mammals and Lakota artifacts given to James Cook by Chief Red Cloud. Darrell Red Cloud, great grandson of Chief Red Cloud, was speaking at the site that day. And last, but not least, Fort Laramie, which was originally established as a fur trading post in 1834. It has the oldest recorded building in Nebraska, “Old Bedlam,” plus 11 other restored buildings and several ruins. We played checkers (neither of us could remember the rules, but Beau definitely won), and drank deliciously cold root beer and cream soda!

Here’s a short video compilation from Fort Robinson State Park too:

This is Fort Robinson State Park in Crawford, NE and it is amazing! After an hour of driving at the edge of a storm, we were greeted by a rainbow at our campsite, and it only got better from there. This park has so much to see and do: 60 miles of hiking, biking, and horse riding trails, stage coach rides and train tours and Jeep rides, an indoor swimming pool, two museums including one with two mammoths that died interlocked together, a bison herd and longhorns and deer, a playhouse with multiple musicals performed every summer, a free rodeo every week…I could go on. A lot has happened in this park over its history, including the site where Crazy Horse was killed and a German POW camp in the 1940s. There are only a handful of places I’d go back to again, and Fort Robinson is definitely one of them!

I didn’t have a bike the first six months we were on the road, but bought one earlier this summer, and am loving the opportunity it’s given me to explore some of the places we’ve visited more fully!

Yesterday we visited the Dignity statue in Chamberlain, SD. A 50-foot tall statue of a woman representing Lakota and Dakota cultures, she holds a star quilt, a gift of high honor.

The first weekend I moved to Nashville for college there was a lightning storm like I’d never experienced before, it spider webbed across the entire sky, seeming to never touch the ground, and I sat on the roof of a parking garage watching in total awe. A few years later I’d have many more lightning memories as my best friend and I would drive around in storms for hours. Traveling through some southern and plains states on the RV this past year, I’ve been able to experience those incredible storms again, and I’m realizing how many storms have held strong memories for me throughout my life. Lightning just isn’t the same in Seattle. Last night Beau said “I think the sky is broken,” he’d never seen lightning like that before. And just like that, new memories are formed 🌩

We went from capital city Bismarck to capital city Pierre (pronounced more like pier than Pierre) this week, the 4th and 5th smallest state capitals by population. Fort Pierre SD sits right across the river and has been putting on a show for us! Can’t beat the incredible view we have from our campsite at River View RV Park.