Colorado

August 2017

Finding a location for a trip is hard. This trip was no different. We had planned to visit a national park in either the US or Canada, but we were too late to get reservations at many of the big ones. Then we thought of Rocky Mountain National Park. There were actually rooms available 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. Like our summer trip last year to the Canadian Maritimes, we were changing hotels every night or two, but we managed to do everything on our carefully planned itinerary plus a few extra things along the way. 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!) and despite getting out of breath a few times, we didn't even need to buy the canned oxygen that is sold at a lot of places! We saw innumerable wild animals and took in some of the most breathtaking scenery of any of our trips.