Life is a Highway

We’ve had a busy couple of days. From Salida, we decided to go all the way to Durango and spend 2 nights here.

We had it all yesterday – sun, sand, mountains, rain and snow. We stopped at Great Sand Dunes National Park. It’s hard to describe some of these places and I’ve run out of other words for beautiful and amazing. Great Sand Dunes is a huge dune area with some of the highest sand dunes in North America. And they are at the foot of the Santa de Christi mountains so they look completely out of context with their surroundings. You can see from the pictures that the people climbing them are just little dots compared to them. We went up the lowest one and allowed that was enough.

Today we went to Mesa Verde NP where the Pueblo Indians once lived in the cliffs. We were unable to go to the cliff dwellings. You could only do that with a Ranger tour and they didn’t start until tomorrow. We were able to see the dwellings from the overlooks and they had a very nice museum them. I think Randy read every exhibit so we wouldn’t have time for the hike I had wanted to do. From there we went to the 4 corners where Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona come together. Not much there other than to say you’ve been there. And we acted like the tourist we are and had someone take our picture. This was one of those “down days” where we spent 8 hours exploring and traveled about 250 miles round trip back to where we started

On to Moab, UT tomorrow. Check out the pictures below and drop us a comment if you wish by clicking the title of the post in the comment section.

We bugged out of Dodge early yesterday to get ahead of any tornado warnings. As a result, had no time to visit Matt Dillon or Miss Kitty. Got to Colorado and spent last night in Manitou Springs just outside of Colorado Springs. We did stop along the way to visit Bent’s Old Fort which was an important trading and resupplying spot on the Santa Fe trail.

Today, we had wanted to drive up Pike’s Peak (over 14,000 feet) but the last 6 miles were closed due to ice so figured if we couldn’t go big, we’d just go elsewhere. We were really disappointed in this but knew there was a likelihood we would not be able to go all the way to the top. We moved on to Royal Gorge and spent several hours there. This was a very pretty spot but somewhat spoiled by all the commercialism. I described it as tourist attraction vomit. There were Jeep tours, ATV tours, dinosaur tours, zip lining, bungee jumping, rafting tours…the list goes on and on. I just wanted to see something beautiful – which I did after I got through all the tourist crap. We took a gondola across the gorge and then walked back on the bridge. One of the most amazing things about this is it was built during the New Deal with workers working 965 feet over the river for less than a $1.00 a day.

Tonight we are in a neat little town called Salida.

Be sure to check out the pictures below.

Yesterday we left St.Louis – after we finally found our car. We were definitely a couple of hicks yesterday. We had parked in a parking garage and when we went back to get the Jeep yesterday morning, we entered by a different door than which we exited. Then realizing our mistake, we had to walk about 2 more city blocks lugging suitcases, backpacks, and various paraphernalia to get to the right door and up a flight of stairs. Once there, our Jeep was just a few feet away. It added about 30-45 minutes to our departure time. It wasn’t funny at the time but by the end of the day, it was.

We had a very pretty drive through Missouri. I was really surprised at how pretty it was. Went to Independence, MI and toured a very nice museum there called the National Frontier Museum. Independence was significant during the westward expansion as pioneers had to register there before going further west. Very interesting. We stayed at and Bed and Breakfast there last night.

Today was a long day across Kansas. Partly because we got a late start, then road construction, then stopped at a couple of times to explore. One place was the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. This is an 11,000 acre preserve maintained by the National Park System. The pictures don’t do it justice but it was beautiful rolling grassland. There were several trails through the grassland but we didn’t do any of them, mainly because of time and thunderstorms in the area. Then in Hutchinson, KS we stopped at the Cosmosphere Space Museum. I could never remember the name of it and kept calling it the Cosmetology Museum but I knew that we would never stop there! Anyway, that was a cool interesting place as well. We drove all the way to Dodge City today and didn’t get here until 7:00pm. Needless to say, we’re tired. On to Colorado tomorrow.