Day 11 - Saturday

We made it home safely Saturday night, after a brief layover in Garden City for steak and potatoes.

Saturday morning wasn't very restful - Adie woke up a couple of times, and Crys said it took about two hours for her to get back to sleep. I slept through part of it, but even Acacia got involved by singing her a lullaby at about 2am.

Around 4am, we noticed that the power had gone out in the hotel, but it came back on about 20 minutes later. What sleep we did get was pretty light, and so we still made it up around 6:30am (without the alarm that got reset in the outage), and we were on the road around 7:30am.

We had to stop on the way out of town for Acacia to get her picture taken with the chrome dragon. Crys had really talked it up, but she was quite disappointed to learn that it wasn't "real".



We stopped on top of the Monarch pass to stretch and look through the gift shop. I finally talked Crys in to driving down the pass since she's never driven in the mountains before. She did great, and actually took us all the way into Canon City.

We rolled into Garden City around 6:30pm, and Roz had supper almost ready for us. Unfortunately Ken had been called out, but we had a good time with Roz. She's looking VERY pregnant, and I'd expect that we'll be driving back out within the next week or two to see a baby boy.



The drive home from Garden City was dark but uneventful. The kids both slept most of the time, and Crys stayed awake to talk with me.


We both agree that we had a wonderful time. The kids were far better than we ever thought they'd be after that long. We got to see a lot of cool things, and generally speaking, we wouldn't have changed a thing about the trip.



Total Miles Traveled: 3132
Hours in Vehicle: 63

Day 10 - Friday

We took it easy today around the Crested Butte area. This morning we drove up Kebler Pass, which is about 10 miles outside of town. The hotel concierge tipped us off that the trees were beautiful up there. They were, and I have photos, but they're still out in the van.

We came back to swim, but it was pretty chilly even for the heated pool, so we spent most of the time in the hot tub.

After that, we went down down and walked around to all of the little shops. We bought a print from a local photographer of the chrome dragon that used to sit just outside of town (it's now inside of town because of a trespassing dispute). Other than that, about the only thing of note was that we made it back to Bacchanale which is an Italian restaurant here in Crested Butte. Crys and I ate here on our honeymoon, and they had one of the best peanut butter pies. This is the second time we've come back, basically to eat their pie.



Tomorrow we had back to Kansas. We're still debating whether or not we'll drive on home tomorrow night, or if we'll stay in Garden City and be home sometime after lunch on Sunday.

Day 9 - Thursday

We decided to be brave this morning and launch out for Crested Butte, instead of staying about half way in Grand Junction. We left the Canyon around 6am (local) time this morning, and arrived at the hotel about 7pm (local, with a 1 hour time difference). It made for a long 12 hour day, but we had some fun, and we're glad to be here. We'll be staying in Crested Butte for two nights, so basically no traveling tomorrow.

Originally, Google Maps said to go through Grand Junction to get here, but when we started out this morning, the GPS decided to take us through the Four Corners, which saved us about 2 hours total drive time. I modified the route slightly to take us through Silverton and Ouray, which we're really glad we did. The trip was absolutely beautiful, with the Aspen trees turning colors.



We stopped in Silverton and visited some of the little shops that we'd went to two years ago when we were up there. I'm glad we stopped, because when we got out, it was very apparent that I'd been riding the brakes too hard as they had a pretty good smell to them. Most of the rest of the trip through Ouray, we stayed in low gear to minimize the braking (yes, Dave, we gave them a break :-) ). I'd never noticed it to be a problem before, but my van only has 3rd gear and 1st gear for options. It was a long trip down the mountain.



The girls were fine on the long drive. Adie actually slept quite a bit today (naturally, no sedatives involved). She's also been talking up a storm - she's even said some two-sylable words (though I can't remember them right now). This morning, she was singing to herself back in the car seat. When she's out, she's really been walking good, even on the uneven rocks at the Canyon.



She also got her first big scrape on the knee yesterday.



We've seen tons of deer the last two days. Most of them (20-30) were in the meadows right outside of the Grand Canyon park. Today we've run across probably another 15-20. We only had to slow down for one of them - the rest have mostly been grazing in the meadows.

Total Miles: 2400

Day 8 - Wednesday

Well, I was right about my suspicions – we have been in the middle of a Ponderosa Pine Forest since about Fredonia.

This morning, we drove up to the Grand Canyon National Park (North Rim), and made it to the visitor center around 9:30. The drive was great through the forest with an occasional meadow clearing.

After talking with the ranger about the park, we drove to one of several points. The sky was clear, temperature crisp (about 64F), and was just good all the way around.

The Canyon was rather amazing. What more can I say, photos just don't do justice to its shear size.

Obviously we've taken lots of photos this trip, about 600 in total so far. I think we've done pretty good about keeping ourselves in a lot of them, and not just scenery.

At the moment, I'm sitting outside of a laundromat here at the rim. We've been driving all day (it's almost 4pm). We needed some more clean close to make it home. Unfortunately, I don't have a cell signal, so I can't get on the Internet right now to upload this.

I'm sitting here watching dozens of bees flocking around the front of everyone's vehicles. When I first saw it, I though it might be a coolant leak that they're smelling, but they're at everyone's cars. It appears that they're eating on any of the dead bugs on the grills. So far they haven't been too interested in actually coming inside the vehicle.

Tonight, we'll be staying at a lodge about 20 miles down the road, just at the entrance to the park.

And some other random thoughts....

I noticed this before on a previous trip (I can't remember where), but it's amazing how many Europeans are at places like this. Just taking a guess, but it seems like roughly 25% of the visitors are from across the pond. I'm not sure what that says when we as American's aren't enjoying our own back yard.

The Garmin Nuvi 200 GPS has been wonderful this trip. Other than specific parks, I haven't looked at a map the entire trip. Initially, I noticed that my van's trip odometer and the GPS's trip odometer were dead on (within .1 miles). Later I saw them start to drift apart by a couple hundred miles. As we were leaving Las Vegas, I stopped for gas on the edge of town, and when the GPS turned back on, for about 20 seconds, it showed a map that appeared to be 20 miles away at the hotel. Ever since then, the trip odometer has been WAY off, and I noticed that my average moving speed jumped up to over 80mph. It appears that it temporarily got lost, and as it found itself, it believed that it was moving very fast for an instant.

Other than that oddity, we've had basically 0 issues with the mapping or routing. I also noticed another useful feature last night in the dark on the windy road. By having a moving map right in front of you, it's very easy to anticipate sharp turns. That came in very handy – now if we could just get obstacles like cows to show up on there...

Miles traveled: 1900

Hours in the vehicle: 39