Westacular

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!

This morning once again we left at the crack of dawn, but thankfully this time we experienced no electrical malfunctions.

Jessie received another Elk wish on the road, a herd was actually crossing the highway in front of us and we had to stop for a moment.  I didn’t have the camera out, but it was more exciting the two we saw yesterday.

As you’ll learn in a later post, we had a plan for this afternoon, so I plugged the destination into our Garmin Nuvi and its estimated time of arrival meant we had some time to kill.  That’s always good news when you’d like to find something interesting.  So a little ways north of Eureka I asked Mr. Garmin if there were any landmark attractions nearby and we were directed to the Carson Mansion. This place is amazing!  You can’t go in, but looking at it was really something.

Then we moved on and Mr. Garmin next suggested the Avenue of the Giants, a scenic alternative to Hwy 101 that drives between more of the stunningly large trees.  It was beautiful.

During the drive through the forest we saw a river not too far away so I got it in my head to check it out.  We navigated a road that seemed to head toward the river and then we came upon a one-lane bridge.

We crossed the first section of the bridge then parked on the rocks and disconnected the Jeep.  It was fun to drive on the beach and through the water, and Sarah Michael loved it.  In fact, Sarah Michael had been wathing videos on the iPod on the RV and decided she didn’t want to stop yet, so despite my counsel to the contrary she brought the iPod into the Jeep.

We were cruising down the rocks and sand and I decided it would be fun to splash into the shallow water.  As we hit the water it splashed high all around us and covered the windshield, I couldn’t see a thing!  But my hands couldn’t find the wiper controls quickly so I didn’t see the larger rocks coming.

The rocks we had been driving on ranged in size from sand to golf balls, like you can see in the picture above, but the rocks we found ourselves on after the soaking were probably more like melon or canteloupe-sized.  They didn’t break anything but they were a surprise!

We continued on a little ways down the river then turned back, we had places to be.