Labor Day Getaway

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:

The second day was a shorter hike (only 6.8 for Mara, and 7.8 for me, more on that in a second). We started from the Cub Lake Trailhead and checked out Cub Lake, The Pool, and Fern Falls. About 2 miles in Mara took yet another spill on the mountain, but this time twisted her ankle pretty good. She was a trooper and finished the hike. From where she fell to Fern Falls was about a 1000 foot gain in elevation, so it was like doing the stairclimber for 3 hours. Fun! When we got back to the Fern Lake Trailhead Mara noticed her ankle was swelling up to about the size of an apple...shit. With our car still a mile away I jogged back to get it. The high altitude and the fact that we had just hiked so much made it a tough jog, but the scenery was so nice to look at, and the adrenaline from Mara's ankle was pushing me along. She looked at her ankle and decided that it would be best to get it looked at and make sure it wasn't broken or torn ligiments. We got to check out the Estes Park ER for about an hour while they took an X-Ray to determine that it was just a bad sprain and some ice and a brace for a couple of days should take care of it. The ER did check the baby's heart beat and everything was just fine, which we assumed already. The Doctor did suggest no more hiking for a few days, but that wasn't a problem since we still had a 12 hour drive ahead of us tomorrow.
We got back to Steph's and made Stir Fry and Pot Stickers for Steph since she was such a great host for us! We filled up on Mara's amazing Pot Stickers first, so Steph has a lot of Stir Fry to take to work the next few days...:) We had some corn starch & water left over from making the Pot Stickers so we introduced Steph the our favorite Non-Newtonian Fluid, OOBLECK! We capped the night off with some ice cream and wine for Steph & I, and a relaxing tub followed by ice cream for Mara. Here are some pictures from our second hike:

Monday morning Steph headed to work @ 5:30 and Mara and I slept in until 7 then picked up Steph's apartment that we had destroyed from cooking and hiking gear we had borrowed from her. Around 9 we met Steph for breakfast at McCoy's Morning Glory and had some AWESOME french toast and quiche. We couldn't get this kind of food in Kirksville if we tried! After saying goodbye to Steph we were on the road. We decided to drive down through Denver and across Kansas so we didn't take the same way home that we came. Bad idea. Let me get to the point...Kansas blows. We were on I-70 for 710 freakin' miles, ~500 of it was on the straightest stretch of road in this world. We could see for probably 30 miles in each direction for about 400 miles of Kansas. At least we're good at keeping each other company! We rolled in to Kirksville around 12:30 on Tuesday morning and crashed until about 10 this morning.
We are still a little sore from so much time in the car, but it was worth every minute! Hope you enjoy the pictures!
Here is a little video of some of the wildlife we saw and (illegally) fed. Apparently Toasted Seseame Sticks & Yogurt Covered Pretzels are like crack to little forest critters:

I've also been messing around with Google Earth and drawing maps & such so here is an overlay of our hiking trials in Google Maps:

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