Since we never really got to take a nice vacation this summer we decided to take some time over our 4 day Labor Day break. With me in the lab all summer, we couldn't take advantage of Mara's time off for more than just short weekend trips. Mara came up with the idea of visiting our friend Steph in Fort Collins, CO and getting in some hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park. We decided to drive through Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming to reach Colorado, then come back through Kansas. Here is our map of the nearly 28 hours we spent in the car. But as you'll see from our photos...it was worth every minute!!!
Our trip out was very uneventful. We left after Mara's last final (Pathology) on Friday around 10am. We swung by Lincoln, NE to see Tim & Allison for two reasons. First, they are moving to Des Moines for Tim's promotion to Top Dog at Grainger in Des Moines, and second, because Allison is due in like 3 minutes so we wanted to see how she was doing. They were both really excited for Baby Beaker/Timmy Pizza and the move. It was a really good idea to break up the trip too since we still had ~8.5 hours left until Steph's. Mara did get to witness the pain of driving across Nebraska for the first time, and I was reminded about how boring that state really is. It's still not the most boring...we'll get to that in a minute.
We stopped in Wyoming about 10:30pm CST, 11:30 MT, and checked out the stars. They were some of the most amazing stars we have ever seen! The Milky Way was very prominent and impressive. We wish we had a camera that could capture it, but you should see it for yourself.
We arrived under the cover of darkness in Fort Collins, which sucked because we couldn't even see the damn mountains! After all that driving we had to wait a whole night to see them...:(
We got up bright and early to head out to the park. Steph, unfortunatly, had to work the whole weekend we were there, but that's the life of a retail manager during a holiday weekend. We'll plan better next time Steph, we promise! Steph helped us map out a trail to take us to Black Lake (one of her favorite views in the park). All in all it was about a 10.8 mile hike from 8200-10,630 feet, so we were sure to take it slow. Let me preface that with the fact that we already spoke to our physician and he said the altitude & hiking was in no way endagering the baby. Just to be safe Mara had a heart rate monitor on just so we could keep track of it, and slowed down when we needed to. That wasn't a hard thing to do because the views were so amazing! We hiked to Alberta Falls, Mills Lake, Jewel Lake, and Black Lake over the course of about 6 hours. The weather was absolutly beautiful! Mara did take a litte spill coming down from Black Lake, but only suffered some scratches on her knees, elbows, arms, knuckles, and a bruised ego...:)
After our hike Steph took us on a tour of "Fort Fun" as she calls it. We ate at a restaurant called Fish (guess what they serve). It was spectacular. The menu actually said for our steamed mussles & scampi "more butter than you want to know about"...:) Needless to say we slept very well that night. Here are some pictures from the first day:
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5 comments:
Gorgeous hiking! I love the trees!!! Happy little trees...sweet belly pic...awesome woodland creatures- did you bring the little fella home for Lucy?
Awesome photos! I'm so jealous : ) Glad you got to take the trip and had such a great time.
Wow - what great pictures! Looks like you had a good time (other than the ankle thing - how is that doing??) Did your dogs destroy your backpack when you brought it home covered with chipmunk scent? (I think ground squirrels have lots of back stripes, but then they may have different varieties in CO!) Unique belly shot - love it!
Awesome pictures! Four things:
1) especially love the pics to Black Lake (I wanna go there!), 2) I also like that black/white picture of the twisted dead tree--love to get a copy! 3) that ain't no freakin' belly (yet) and 4) don't feed the animals--they'll run all over ya! ;) --Overall sounds like a great time. Hope Mara's ankle is healing well.
Looks like you had a great time! I hope Mara's ankle is doing better! What a frisky little duck HA!
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