Hiking in Castlewood Canyon

Hiking is totally different here. So far we’ve been to two state parks, Castlewood Canyon and Roxborough.

There is so much rock and sand that there is very little mud.

Some places let you climb on the rocks, and some don’t.

We also have a whole new set of flora and fauna to learn. And we better do it quick. Just yesterday we stumbled upon a rather unhappy bull snake. Let me rephrase… a BIG and unhappy bull snake. These guys are not poisonous, but that doesn’t make them friendly by any means.

He wouldn’t budge. You’ll see in the photo below that he was on a narrow set of stairs. It happened to be the only way out of the park, unless we wanted to go another 2 miles back the other way. We thought we’d wait him out, you know, let him go along his merry way, but his merry way was sitting on those stairs, ready to strike. Having been lax in practicing our Crocodile Hunter snake capture skills, we were slightly baffled on how to end this encounter. Somehow the snake and Mike and Anne all felt cornered.

Luckily a guy with a stick coming down the stairs eventually removed the snake from our path. Phew!

Check out Roxborough State Park.

Normal Life – May

The People’s Fair
Similar to the Twin Lakes arts & Heritage Festival, the People’s Fair in Capitol Hill is a conglomeration of art, music, kids wearing goofy hats, and meat on a stick. We rode our bikes there, and strolled around in the sun eating kettle corn. Now that’s a nice Sunday. This photo was taken while drinking vodka tonics and listening to a polka band.

Happy Hour at Benny’s
By the end of May, we had discovered Benny’s, a Mexican restaurant a few blocks away. This is by far the best Mexican food we’ve ever had. Bar none. And the margaritas h’aint too shabby neither. On occasion, we pop in for happy hour. This photo is of a spot well-hit and the evidence of two very full and very happy bellies.

Hiking in Roxborough State Park

This is actually the first place we found. It is about 45 minutes southwest of where we live. It is amazing how quickly one can leave a major city and be able to see miles and miles of flat nothing and beautiful mountains. We took a photo of Denver off in the distance, but it was really to hazy to post online.

The rock formations here are more then 1.2 billion years old and produce microclimates. How cool it that? 

You’re not allowed to climb on the rocks here because they’re actually pretty fragile. I’m no rock genius, but I think they’re a form of sandstone. 

These pictures don’t show how red the rocks really are. They’re similar to the ones that form Red Rocks Amphitheater… a place we’ll be going soon. 

We saw some huge birds of prey circling above and believe it or not, in this middle of all of this sand and stone, there was a little grassy wetland that harbored frogs. 

The Move

Thank you Dustin, MIke, John, Bummy, Ray, and P for all of your help loading our entire house into this glorious yellow truck.

And super mega thanks to Margaret and Brad who hauled our arses across the country! (FYI, Brad drove the truck all 1500 miles while Mike ate candy and looked out the window. Brad, we owe you big!)

You know you know good people when they volunteer to help you move with only beer and pizza in return.

Pennsylvania
All morning the rain clouds loomed black over Mattern Ave, but with everybody’s help, the truck was loaded just before the big drops started falling.

This is our last look at the I-79 interchange on Parkway West… would you believe there were 6 miles of construction?

Ohio
Unfortunately, there was nothing photoworthy in Ohio. Sorry all you people who like the state. It is really quite dull. In fact, Kansas has better scenery… oooh ouch.

But you can see the kickass cat safety belt system in the back seat of the Kia. We’ve got cotton rope and aluminum clips attached to a cat harness. It worked well, as we had no CATastrophies… ba dum bum…

Indiana
By Indiana, we were a little punchy.

We had packed the truck by 2:00pm and were driving for the past 9 hours.

We rolled into our hotel in Terre Haute at 11:00pm eastern, 10:00pm central time. Did you know that Terre Haute, Indiana happened to be host of a major bowling tournament on April 30? Oh we sure did.

As it turned out, the only room in town (at a truck-friendly hotel) was a smoking king with a pull-out sofa. Lucky Mike slept in the King with the girls while poor Brad slept on the floor with the mattress from the sofa.

We had hopes of taking a dip before bed, but the 3 dozen (surprisingly well-behaved) children in the pool and the shady people in the hot tub convinced us otherwise. Also, Mike and Anne realized that their bathingsuits were in the truck about 16 feet from the from the door and inside of dresser drawers that had been carefully stabelized by Anne’s dad with about 385 cubic feet of boxes. It was also at this time that Anne realized that was also the approximate location of her toothbrush…

Illinois
Illinois was beautiful. The sun was out and the travelling was good. Nothing but open road and loads of farm land.

If any of you have seen the movie “Gummo,” you’ll start to understand why those people were feeding glass to cats for fun… To those of you who have not seen the movie, I don’t suggest you do.

And for those of you who always wondered why Bob Ross puts those broken down sheds in all of his paintings, my hypothesis: he loves Illinois.

Missouri
Our Welcome to Missouri was this cool view of St. Louis. Rt 70 goes right through St. Louis the way Parkway East and West do Pittsburgh, only actually more complicated. There was plenty of merging and and traffic dodging to do.

Overall, it looked like a cool city.
Of course, after St. Louis, there was nothing.

Except for a bunch of weird highway signs for routes named after letters… what’s up with that?

You know you’re in the boonies when you see a Boonville watertower.

So we kept on truckin’.

Kansas
We were dreading this part of the trip. If you look at a map of Kansas, you’ll find one city, Kansas City. And even Kansas City is trying so hard to get out of Kansas that 1/2 of it is in Missouri. As it turns out, Kansas is pretty neat.

We saw the most interesting landscape of the trip in eastern Kansas. There were so many little hills and valleys, and yet, we could still see for miles on end.

But hold on to your goats–there were at least 25 signs for adult stores just along I-70.

Here’s Topeka… as well as the last of the civilization we saw for a long long long time.

We were halfway through the state by afternoon on our second day and making such good time, we figured we could keep driving. The problem was, Kansas ran out of cities before we ran out of stamina.

So we called for backup. Thanks to the swift e-searching by Anne & Margaret’s parents, we were able to find a bunch of hotel vacancies in Hays, KS.

The town was a small dot on the map, but proved to have everything we needed.

Hays, KS
oh baby it’s taco time! After passing several appetizing options of seafood and chinese food buffets (in the middle of landlocked corn country, mind you), we found ourselves at the Taco Shop. The 12 block drive between our Days Inn and the Taco Shop were Mike’s first and last official legs of the trip. Congratulations Mike!
After a long day of driving, Margaret was excited to order a vegetable burrito. Unfortunately, it consisted completely of refried beans and lettuce… yum? Brad ordered us chips and con queso to share and the cheese (which was only slightly thicker than tomato juice) tasted eerily like the Hempfield Band sub cheese.

Then it was back to the room for beer!

The next morning, as Mike transported the cat carrier back to the truck, Anne was searching for her car keys. The keys were found, conveniently in Mike’s pocket. We were totally ready for our shortest driving day of 5 hours to Denver.

Colorado
Wahoo! We finally crossed the Colorado state border! Only 2 more hours to go!

At this point, we’ve driven for 2 days and 3 hours. Mike has paid about $450 in diesel fuel (yikes!). Maceo has stopped trying to climb into the driver’s seat. And we’re all impressed at how smooth the trip has been.
We arrived at 2:00 pm mtn time on Monday.

Our new landlord had blocked off our side of the street so that we could park easily and gave us a bottle of wine too. How nice!

Aunt Marcia and Uncle Tim came over to welcome us to our new home (with a shower curtain, as per my request) and to heft some boxes.
Thank you!

After Mike came back from taking Brad home, we cleared off space on the loveseat and had a beer. We were asleep shortly thereafter.

The next day we squeezed ourselves around the stacks of boxes and started getting settled.

Here we are at the end of a long trip, but it is only the beginning!