Colorado Trip...Part 1

It has been a very long time since I posted anything new.  We kind of left off on a sour note.  I'm sorry I was so hostile.  I'm feeling better now.  Let's start fresh and talk about our trip to Colorado.

We headed to Colorado for a week's worth of fun back in June (the 18th through the 24th to be exact).  It was hot.  This was our peak temperature as we headed through western Kansas.  Luckily our van has really great AC so we didn't notice the heat.

We borrowed a cabin for the week near Cripple Creek which is just southwest of Pike's Peak.  This hummingbird (and some of its friends) were our first visitors.  

This is the view from the loft of the cabin.  While there were other cabins nearby, all those trees made it feel quite secluded.  We got a lot of pictures of the view from the different decks of the cabin but never got a shot of the cabin from the outside. Oops!

The kids playing up in the loft.

The first day of our trip was devoted to getting acclimated.  We hung out in the cabin and explored Cripple Creek a bit.  Cripple Creek is almost completely casinos but we were still able to find some things of interest for the kids.  We visited the fire station and Asher and Addilyn got to sit in a fire engine.  They were pretty excited!  After all that sitting around, we decided to try out one of our more adventurous excursions the next day.  We decided to try out Shelf Road.

Shelf Road is the road between Cripple Creek and Canon City.  I won't say it's the quickest road because it took us longer to get to Canon City than it took to get back (when we took a more roundabout road) but it is certainly the most direct. 

It is a road that was blown out of the side of a canyon back in the gold rush days.  It is generally only wide enough for one vehicle except where they have turnouts (like the one we were parked at above). 

Notice the hole in the rock?  Addilyn says it's there because a dinosaur kicked through it.   

Here's the part that was blown out of the canyon.  It was a little unnerving at first but isn't the view spectacular?

From this angle you can see just how far down the canyon goes.

After going approximately 12 miles in an hour and 15 minutes, we stopped to stretch our legs at Red Canyon Park.

 The kids collected rocks.

This is their pile of rocks.  I think this picture says a lot about their respective personalities.


That's it for our first installment.  Next time we'll show pictures from our trip to the Royal Gorge.