Atherton Family Notes

The drive to Colorado on Sunday wasn’t difficult…it was just long, and we are thankful for that. After hearing about the road conditions in Kansas, we were worried. When all was said and done, though, we barely saw any snow at all on the roads until we were up in the mountains, and even then, the roads were easily passable.

Through most of Nebraska and Colorado, the temperature was above 60. On the other hand, it was decidedly windy, blowing out of the south-southwest, which meant it was nearly perpendicular to the roads we were on. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tumbleweed before, but yesterday, I think I saw nearly every one in the entire western United States.

The other thing we saw a lot of, especially in central Nebraska, was flocks and flocks of cranes. We would see hundreds at a time sitting in the otherwise empty cornfields. I guess they were eating whatever leftover corn they could find.

When we crossed into Colorado, we stopped at a rest stop and decided to spend the night in Estes Park, which is located at the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountain National Park. This allowed us to spend the waning hours of the day driving through the mountains, rather than seeing them from a distance in Boulder, which had been our previous plan (that would have been plan version 5-e mark IV update R preliminary – to be discussed but not released, if I remember correctly).

The drive was beautiful as we had hoped, and we immediately saw differences with some of the other mountain ranges with which we are familiar, which made it even more interesting.

By the time we arrived in Estes Park, though, the temperature had dropped to the teens, and the wind was still blowing really hard. Sandi and the girls were starting to curse my name for bringing them on such a cold spring vacation.

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The bad news about taking a trip to Colorado at this time of year is that the Trail Ridge road, the most famous and scenic route through the Rockies is closed. The entire road is at a very high elevation, and stays dangerous and snow covered between November and May.

There are other routes you can take that are open and relatively safe by the end of March, so we headed over to the national park visitor center to see if we could get some information about which ones to take, but unfortunately, it turns out that the visitor center is only open on the weekends during the off season, so that didn’t help. The souvenir store was open, (of course) so we did a little bit of shopping.

We decided to head into Boulder and stopped at a chocolate shop on the way out of Estes Park, and the cashier confirmed for us that there was a good scenic route to take to get to Boulder. It was not the quickest route, but it would be interesting and would be clear.

Sandi observed that every conversation we’ve had with a local in this area always turned to the subject of whether the roads involved were snow-covered. I think this says a lot about the amount of forethought that is required to live in this part of the country.

So we headed out of Estes Park on route 7 towards Nederland, and it was clearly the right choice. We kept seeing beautiful vista after vista, and the anticipation of what we might see around the next bend made the morning’s journey a lot of fun.

At least, that’s how it was for Sandi and me. The girls kept phasing in and out of awareness thanks to their Nintendo DS game systems. We tried to convince them to put the games away and look outside, but this only led to the inevitable pinching and poking wars so common to siblings. In the end, we settled for pointing out the highlights, and letting the girls be the rest of the time.

We didn’t stop very often to take pictures because of the weather conditions — it was way too cold and windy to stand outside for very long. We did stop long enough to take this picture, though:

This small church (named St. Malo’s) was built on a rock outcropping just beside the road.  Sandi and I both hopped out to take a few pictures, feeling all the time like we were going to get blown backwards into the gorge behind us.  It was worth it, though.  :)

After we arrived in Nederland, we turned towards Boulder and began a fairly rapid descent to our next destination, the Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory.

A side note: We realized at some point during today’s trip that the single most popular vehicle on the road in this area is the Subaru Outback. It’s astonishing how many we’ve seen, especially when you consider how many other 4WD vehicles there are to choose from. The Outback can’t make up more than a percent or two of all vehicles on the road in the US, but in the Rockies it seems to jump to about 1 in 4. I suppose this is at least one bright spot for the Subaru plant in Lafayette, Indiana.

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Colorado is awesome! I think everyone should be able to go at least once. The mountains are beautiful, especially Pikes Peak. The snow makes it look like a place you would go sledding. I would, if it was: 1.less steep and 2. if there were no trees.

We are going up today by car.  It takes two hours to get up there and two hours to get down!  Unfair!!!!

But the rest is awesome!

Hope you have/had an awesome spring break!

Pikes Peak, as seen from the Garden of ther Gods

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I’m not anywhere near ready to write about everything we’ve done today.  In fact, I haven’t finished with yesterday yet!

Today was so interesting though, I thought I’d jot down at least a summary of what happened:

1.  We didn’t get to go to the top of Pikes Peak, nor did we get to take the train.

2. We didn’t get to eat at the restaurant that we wanted to.

3. We didn’t get to see the fossil fields (we got there 1 minute too late).

4. We almost killed ourselves driving on a crazy back road through a canyon.  The girls almost killed me (even after we survived) just because I chose that route.

(4.5 The girls want to point out that the Playplace at the McDonald’s where we stopped to use their wifi and find a hotel was closed.)

5. Just to top it off, we locked the car keys in the trunk.

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OK, so the other post I wrote about today’s events was a little misleading, so I’d like to give you a little better picture of what really happened today.

1.  It’s true.  We didn’t get to take the cog railroad to the top of Pikes Peak.  The railway is closed, today and tomorrow, for some reason not entirely clear to us.  So we drove instead, along the Pikes Peak Toll Road.  It was significantly less expensive, but we couldn’t get to the top from there either.  What we did get to do is stop at the lodge at about 11,000 feet and talk to them about the difficulty of keeping the roads clear between snow storms.  It turns out that we couldn’t have even gotten to the 11,000 foot mark on Monday and and tonight they are expecting more snow that could cut off the road again.  The crew spent today fighting the conditions above the treeline, where drifting snow is making it nearly impossible to clear a path even to allow employees to meet the train at the top.  All in all, it was pretty amazing talking to them about the work, there were very few other people on the road, so we could stop and take pictures whenever we wanted and just enjoy a peaceful drive.

2.  Since we didn’t go all the way to the summit of Pike Peak, it turned out that we had time to eat lunch in Old Colorado City.  We had read about a local restaurant making real Italian-style brick-oven pizzas, and thought this sounded like a great choice.  When we got there, we discovered that they only serve luncha few days a week, and Tuesday isn’t one of those days.  So we walked up to another local restaurant called the Mason Jar, and had an enjoyable lunch there.  The girls each got a small pack of “WikkiStix” that kept them busy for the rest of the day, and I got to try a great locally-brewed honey wheat beer.

3.  We did just miss the fossil fields, but we would have had to have gotten there a lot earlier to really see anything.  Instead, we spent a little longer in Manitou Springs, where the kids and I got to play with a different kind of “fossil” — an arcade filled old pinball and arcade machines.  All at original prices, I might add.  We spent an hour there and it only cost us $2.00.  We played very early versions of Foosball, pinball machines old enough to have tiny flippers and manual loading of the ball into the field where the plunger is, and several other amusements that haven’t been current for almost a century.  It was a blast, and Carissa and I hated to leave (the others had pretty much had their fill, though).

4.  The road in question was the Shelf road, a barely maintained, guard-rail-free, often-only-1-lane dirt road that clings to the side of a canyon in the mining area south of Cripple Creek.  I cheerfully ignored the “four wheel drive vehicles recommended” sign and headed out to what promised to be the best scenic route into Canon City.  The trip was simultaneously gorgeous, terrifying, dizzying and exhilarating.  We saw some really amazing sights, hopefully got some good pictures, and got some memories burned into our brains that we will never forget.  Sandi and Carissa are already planning the post that they are going to write about the experience.  I’m sure I won’t be the hero of the story.

5.  OK, the last one is just bad.  Sandi was unloading the truck at our hotel, and closed the trunk after having sat the keys down in the truck while she put on her jacket.  She’s downstairs right now, waiting for the locksmith to arrive.  It’s going to cost us $48, but to be fair, it adds a fine story to cap our crazy day.

We’re going to the Royal Gorge tomorrow and the we’ll finish the day in Denver.  Hopefully, the sights will be just as impressive as the ones we saw today, but the trip less exasperating.

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