Climb high

Every so often, you have to get out of town. For us, it's been a good two years, maybe more, since we've been on vacation. Like, real vacation. So we did what every right-minded parent of a 3-year-old kid does — drop the kid off at grandma and grandpa's house and skip town. Destination: Denver.

The plan was as follows: Go to Denver and do things. We had solid plans for Friday night — Cubs and Rockies — and Saturday afternoon: hiking with our friend, Dane. When we rolled into town on Wednesday, we got set up in the motel and set about making plans for the next couple of days.

Thursday: Boulder, Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park.


We headed to Boulder for breakfast and checked a few places out (like University Bicycles). After that, we headed to Estes Park. Like most days on the Front Range, we saw clouds roll in shortly after lunchtime. We finished up and headed to Rocky Mountain National Park.

As you can in the pictures, it stayed cloudy. Actually, it rained lightly pretty much the whole time we were there. It certainly didn't hurt the view. It was pretty amazing. We headed back to Boulder for supper and ended up at Mountain Sun Brewery.

On Friday, we planned on spending the day in downtown Denver. We were going to meet our friends Carrie and Tom (newlyweds!) for the baseball game later, but in the meantime wanted to take advantage of the downtown area. The main draw was the traveling King Tut exhibit at the Denver Art Museum.

Cool, huh? Well, not for $30 a pop. I love history, especially one-of-a-kind things like that, but $60 for the two of us ... nah. Instead, we went to the Colorado state capitol building. It was free. (This is a view from the capitol, by the way, not of the capitol.)

You'll see no pictures of Coors Field, even though it's really cool. I'm trying to forget the baseball part of that whole thing. (The Cubs managed to lose 17-2. It was fairly spectacular.) Oh, and before the game, we went here.

Saturday: Back to Boulder. Dane, who will be starting his first year as a teacher any day now, likes to hike on the weekends. And, as people who like to take advantage of local connections, we asked him to take us hiking. We hit some trails at Rocky Mountain National Park, but we really wanted to hike.

The route took us to the foot of the Flatirons at Chautauqua Park. We were headed to Royal Arch, which was certainly cool. But the views and the terrain on the way up were way more impressive.




Sitting on what felt like the top of the world. Dane, Chris and me.

We headed back on Sunday morning. Man, that's a long drive. People malign Nebraska for being boring, but eastern Colorado is something else entirely.