Westacular

From about the time I was in preschool through third grade my family lived in Fort Collins, Colorado.  Since our route though Colorado towards Mount Rushmore went right through Ft Collins, I wanted to show the girls where I lived during these young years.

First we drove past the church where I went to preschool.  Then we went by my old elementary school.  The building looked so small!  The building looked exactly as I remembered it, except that what used to be seem large is now obviously designed for very small people.  We drove past the swimming pool I would play in during the summer, the SCCA, a place I had totally forgotten about.

We drove the route I used to walk to and from school and the distance was a lot shorter than I remember.  But the neighborhood didn’t seem to have changed at all.  I showed Jessie and Sarah Michael where my friend Kyle lived, and where the neighbor Lola lived.

Then we got to our old house at 205 Darmouth Trail. The house is just as I remember, though I’m sure the shutters are a different color, and the trees are now much larger.

Less than a block away from our old house was the park where I would play as a boy.  I showed SM the lake I used to fish in, the creek I used to pull crawdads from, I even remembered one of the trees that stood beside the creek.  I walked up the hill I used to sled down and took in the view, the park is so beautiful.  Sarah Michael played on the playground, and she and I went on the swings together.  It was a lot of fun.

We were so lucky to live in such a cute little neighborhood with a wonderful park practically across the street.

North of Moab we got onto eastbound I-70.  This is really one of the first times on the trip we’ve spent a lot of time on an actual interstate freeway.  The speed limit is 75, but we can’t go that fast.

I-70 is impressive, as it moves into the mountains the east and west-bound lanes are for long stretches elevated on bridges, allowing them to be wider than they could be if the road had been build on the actual ground.  It looks cool, too.  Well done highway designers.

We made our way along, and it was fun to see the landscape change.  The rocky cliffs remained for a while, but green trees started to appear and the hillsides grew greener and greener.

We got hungry and asked the Garmin which restaurants were nearby, and lucky for Sarah Michael her favorite kind of food was just few miles ahead.  Sato Sushi was the place in Edwards, CO.  The food was good and town is cute.  It should be, it is quite near Vail and affluence clearly infects this place too.  If I could afford it it seemed like a nice place to live.

As we climbed the mountain pass higher, it began to rain.  This was a nice change.  We haven’t seen proper rain for quite a while and I missed it!  Then we climbed even higher and the rain started to change to snow!  The highest we got was just over 11,000 feet, there was more mountain still ahead of us but thankfully we were spared more climbing, the long Eisenhower-Johnson tunnel allowed us to start going back down.  This was good, the RV was really laboring to pull itself and the jeep up the steep grade and we were not able to maintain any speed at all.  By the time we reached the entrance to the tunnel we were down to 25 miles an hour.

As we neared the bottom of the mountain near Denver, we saw a couple of great freeway signs.  They came and went too quickly for us to get pictures, but RockyMountainRoads has pictures here and here.

We finally arrived our destination, St. Vrain State Park, after 10pm, though we would have been there sooner had the Garmin actually known where the place was.  I had preloaded the GPS system with our destinations based on addresses or other info we got when booking our stays, and we were sent about three miles off course.  Not a great distance, but when you’re driving a vehicle with a 100-yard turning radius that can’t back up because of its towed vehicle it makes correcting navagational mistakes more of a challenge.

Good night!