Colorado

We just got back today from Colorado. We had a great time, Colorado is a beautiful place.

We arrived on Tuesday and stayed in Louisville, just outside of Boulder. That night we had pizza with Skip's cousin Eric while Zoe played with her 2nd cousins Eva and Fiona.

On Wednesday we visited the Butterfly Pavilion, Zoe had a great time checking out all the different butterflies. We walked Pearl Street in Boulder and had dinner at a swanky Indian restaurant. That day Nikki lost her cell phone (either in the restaurant or stolen in the hotel room-not sure which).

On Thursday we headed up to the Rocky Mountains. We stayed at a great cabin in Estes Park beside the Big Thompson River (it was about 40 feet from our door). We didn't realize hummingbirds sound kind of like crickets until we tried to figure out what the cricket like noises were all around the cabin (there were a lot of hummingbirds there)! We went into Rocky Mountain National park and came across a whole heard of elk in Moraine Valley. For about 15 minutes we were the only ones in the valley we could see, just us and about 100 elk. It was a great experience.

On Friday we went back to the park and went up to Bear Lake. We didn't know Bear Lake was still frozen and the whole area was covered in snow. Zoe had a great time playing on the snow. We went down from the 9475 feet altitude to an area with hardly no snow at all, Sprague Lake. We walked around the beautiful lake for a couple of hours. A chipmunk came up very close to Zoe, we think they wanted to be friends.

On Saturday we went back to the park and went to Alberta Falls, we hiked as far as we could but the snow stopped us eventually, it became too think and icy and we had to turn around. Zoe had a great time with the snow again. We realized that we were not wearing the correct shoes, Nikki with her flat soled, vegetarian boots and me with my hemp and rubber shoes didn't mixed well with all the rocks and snow. We did realize we truly enjoy hiking and plan to make it a serious hobby, (but next time we will have better shoes). We drove on Trail Ridge road for a bit, checked out some views and then went to find some big horn sheep. We hear these guys are hard to spot. We went to Sheep Lake, one of the better places to view them, but they weren't there. We decided to go and drove out of the park. About 2 miles outside the park a little crowd of people were looking up a rocky hillside and there were a bunch of big horn sheep! After Zoe's nap we went into the town of Estes for dinner and a big ice cream cone.

The best way to see the photos we took is by going to our online gallery here and viewing the slideshow.