For our late summer trip this year, we decided to go to Rocky Mountain National Park. We started in Estes Park, the eastern gateway to the park. Once we’d settled on this, we did what we always do. We mapped out everything there was to do for about 100 miles around and laid out a plan to hit every one of them. We changed hotels every night or two, but we managed to do everything on our carefully planned itinerary in Estes Park, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Canon City, Cripple Creek, Pueblo and Denver. We’d never spent much time at high altitude before so we weren’t sure how much it would slow us down. As it turned out, it didn’t slow us down at all. We walked over 50 miles and climbed more stairs than I can count (don’t worry, my FitBit did count all of it!). We saw innumerable wild animals and took in some of the most breathtaking scenery of any of our trips.
It’s taken a few months but I got all of the photos from the trip sorted and you can check them out right here.
While looking for someplace to go for a day trip, we stumbled upon a balloon festival in North Jersey. Since hot air balloons always make for great photos, I couldn’t pass it up. We bought tickets and headed to Readington Airport. Unfortunately, the day was pretty overcast and there were scattered showers throughout the day. Some of the traditional balloons were able to launch but all of the larger shaped balloons either inflated and stayed tethered or just didn’t inflate at all. As it turned out, the unexpected part that made the price of admission worth it was all of the companies that were there handing out samples of their products. It was a bizarrely eclectic mix of stuff. From Advil to Minute Rice to flavored milk and on and on, we had to make the long muddy walk to the car twice just to offload all of the stuff we’d been given! It was a fun day and we managed to stay mostly dry while watching the balloons that were brave enough to take off despite the questionable weather.
I just posted the last of my photos from 2016. Back in October, we spent a long weekend at Lake Wallenpaupack, a man-made lake in the Northern Poconos created as a reservoir for a hydroelectric plant. Because we left in the evening after work, we stopped and spent a night at Sands in Bethlehem before heading the rest of the way up to the Poconos. Our first stop was in Honesdale to board a train for a scenic ride along the path of the former Delaware and Hudson Canal to check out the beautiful Fall foliage. We then headed to Hawley to check in to our motel right across the street from the lake. We sent much of the weekend walking and driving around the lake and exploring downtown Hawley. Along the way we found time to stop at a few very cool diners. After heading out of town, on our way home, we went to a cider mill because nothing says Fall like a cider mill. Then we visited the home of the first chief of the US Forest Service, Grey Towers. It’s now a national historic landmark and museum. All in all, it was a slower paced, more relaxing vacation than we usually like to take, but it was still a lot of fun.