Colorado Trip Day Five Extra

Hi Blog Followers!

No, we did not fall off the mountain side yesterday. We stayed the night in a B & B deep in a canyon 10 miles west of Cortez called Kelly Place. It is actually a neighbor of Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. Because it was so far in the canyon (and the canyon walls were hight), there was no cell phone signal, no TV signal, and no internet.

It was a rustic type of experience, but we did have electric and running water. Here are some pictures of our room.

Tuesday and Wednesday nights we are staying in the Historic Strater Hotel in Durango. I'll include pictures of the hotel and our room in tomorrow night's blog installment.

I've posted blogs for both Monday and Tuesday just following this one. Enjoy!

Susan and Denis

Colorado Trip Day Five 9-7-10

Hello Blog Friends and Followers:

Today we visited our next National Park, Mesa Verde. Mesa Verde is famous for the cliff dwellings located within it. These dwellings were the homes of the ancient Puebloan people, ancestors of the Pueblos living in the southwest today. We toured the dwelling known as Cliff Palace, for which we descended stone steps 100 feet. This dwelling was a community of about 100 people, all living and working for the common good. They grew corn, pinto beans, and squash. Cliff Palace was built around 1100 A.D. It was abandoned around 1300 A.D.
This is known as a kiva, or sacred underground room. These pillars supported a grass and thatch roof, with one hole in the center for a ladder.

These stones are held together with a mortar mix of sand and water.

These doorways are about 4 ft high. The People (as they are now known) stood about 5' to 5'5".

This dwelling was built from the inside of the cave to the outside. It has rooms that go back 90 feet from the front.This is one of the ladders in a narrow opening in the rock that we had to climb up to get to the top of the mesa. There were three of these 10' ladders.

Tomorrow we will be riding the Durango - Silverton railway. See you then.

Susan and Denis

Colorado Trip Day Four 9-6-10

Greetings blog followers:

Today we left Grand Junction on a beautiful warm and cloudless day and headed for Arches National Park in Utah. We took the "scenic" route along the Colorado Riverway, and the scenery did not disappoint. Here is what we saw:

Here we are at Arches National Park. Our claim to fame today is a 200 ft hike on an uphill trail to get a good view and photo of Delicate Arch, the most photographed and most famous arch in the park. I'll let the pictures do the talking....Enjoy

Susan and Denis

The Three Gossips

Balanced Rock

North Window

Delicate Arch

The Devil's Garden

We thought this one was very pretty, but we don't recall the name.

lll

More Art on The Corner

Grand Junction has a nice little downtown. It's beauty and charm is enhance by Art on the Corner, which showcases art sculpture pieces in a variety of mediums by local and Colorado artists. Some are on permanent display, but many are for sale. Here are a few of our favorites:

Colorado 2010 Day 3 9-5-2010

Greetings blog followers,

Tonight we'm writing to you from Grand Junction. Yes, we have arrived at our destination! We woke to a brisk morning (about 50 degrees) in Winter Park. We ate breakfast in our room (we had a kitchenette), and headed out over Berthoud Pass, then picked up I-70 west. We stopped off in Vail for a few hours. We walked around and looked at the shops, the ski lift, and just the town in general. There were alot of people in Vail today, since they were having some kind of street festival going on. Since we were they over the noon hour, we decided to stay for lunch, then continued our journey west. We stopped in at a rest area in Glenwood Canyon near a town called "No Name", where we saw people rafting on the Colorado River. It was a lovely little rest area there, in the valley next to the river. We've included a picture of the rafters, and you can see where the roadway cantilevers out over the river. We arrived in Grand Junction around 4:00 this afternoon. The temperatures got warmer as we went further west. It was 95 degrees in Grand Junction when we arrived. We ventured downtown and looked at some of the "Art on the Corner" sculpture pieces. We took the required picture with "Chrome on the Range" (scroll down, you'll see what I mean). Tomorrow we leave Fran in Grand Junction to visit as we head to Arches National Park. We'll send pictures of the park from Cortez. Enjoy the pictures.

Susan and Denis


This statue commemorates the soldiers who trained in the Vail area during WWII.



Mt. Garfield, a Grand Junction landmark.
Our obligatory visit with "Chrome"
See you tomorrow from Cortez!

COLORADO 2010 DAY TWO 9-4-10

Greetings blog followers!We began our day early with breakfast at our hotel in Kearney. By noon we were ready for lunch and found a very cute little park in Greeley where we made our picnic lunch. Conditions were much better today, with little or no wind, and temperatures in the upper 80's.

After our lunch, we continued on our way west on US 34, which took us directly into the park.

Estes Park was jammed with people and cars, and it took us over a half hour to get through it. There were shops of everykind, and it reminded me of Wisconsin Dells, only times ten. Once through that madhouse, we finally made it to the park for some very grand scenery. It must have been a warm summer here in the Rockies, as the snow is all but gone from the peaks, and hasn't started to fall yet. It was definately cooler up at 11,000+ feet...the temp below in Estes Park was 88 degrees, but at the Alpine Visitor Center it was a brisk 58 degrees. Here are some select pictures from our visit to the park. We also crossed the continental divide on our way down to Winter Park. Tomorrow is scheduled to be an easier day...we are only about 20 miles from I-70, and about 3 1/2 hrs from Grand Junction. We plan to stop in Vail for lunch, and should be in GJ by late afternoon. See you from the Western Slope tomorrow night!

Susan, Denis & Fran

Colorado Trip Day One

Greetings blog followers!

Tonight we are writing to you from Kearney, Nebraska, about 700 miles and 13 hours after we left Plover this morning (5:30 am). As you all in Wisconsin know, it was very windy and cold today, especially this morning. We decided to eat breakfast "in" this morning, and stopped at a nice little truck stop and restaurant in Sparta. We had lunch "out" at a rest area just west of Des Moines, Iowa, and were almost literally blown away by the winds. We arrived in Kearney around 6:30, and ate "in" at a nice restaurant called Grandpa's Steakhouse.

The weather was good, except for the wind...it was very cloudy and overcast until we were in central Iowa, when the clouds finally moved off, the sun came out, and the temperature went up. The high today was 77 degrees in eastern Nebraska. There was quite a bit of traffic once we got to Omaha, and it continued to be heavy on I-80 heading west until we passed Grand Island.

Here are our pictures for today...Enjoy

The wide Missouri (I hope for a better one on the way back):

The Mighty Mississippi:

The Open Road (heading west in western Iowa...note the blue sky):

More tomorrow...we will be in Rocky Mountain National Park in the heart of the Rockies!

Susan, Denis, & Fran