Colorado Day 1

Sunrise in Denver was probably pretty nice...We slept through it! :D Since Leann had never been to Denver we decided to take a slow morning in the city. We ate breakfast at Snooze: An AM Eatery which did have incredibly good breakfast...but incredibly busy and not so great of service. I guess they have two locations so maybe the other one isn't so bad. We left full either way. My hopes for the day had been to do the Lariat Loop Historic Byway with a variation to Mt Evans and end the day north towards Rocky Mountain NP. And we almost did all that!

After leaving breakfast and the heart of Denver we headed out to Golden since we had a deadline to meet there:

We had to wait nearly an hour for our free tour, but I am a sucker for brewery tours and free beer so we waited it out. I'm sure there are beer snobs reading this in agony, as I choose the largest and most mainstream brewery in the area to visit instead of hundreds of "craft brewers" nearby. *shrug* oh well. On our way into the brewery I had noticed a couple signs for the Lariat loop so we headed out as soon as we got back to the truck and grabbed some sandwiches in town.

we took a short hike from the road because there was a swarm of either paragliders or powered paragliders taking off from somewhere on this hill. Never did find them but you can see a speck of one in the center of this picture. Also Golden and Denver in the distance. This hilltop was neat, to me, because you could see one of the main E-W streets in Denver pointed right through this hilltop. After our hike we continued up the switchbacks and through the hillside communities along the Loop road. Eventually I spotted signs for Mt Evans and we took off up more windy hillside roads to the west. I saw lots of camo-wrapped development cars along this route, which I of course was facinated by. We eventually ran into their hotel headquarters in Dillon, but that comes later! We made it all the way to the base of the Mt Evans auto road, via this backroad, only to decide that we didn't have time to drive up it! :D we are such dorks. On the way down from Mt. Evans we passed the most rediculous thing I had seen yet. So rediculous that I had to turn around and take a picture.

You saw that right! A Hummer in the bed of a Duece-n-a-half. And a Dodge Megacab dually. Whom ever this is is ready to drive over some stuff! Eventually we made it down to Indian Springs on I-70 and took that back east until we hit the Peak-to-Peak Historic Byway and headed north. This is a pretty busy route in spots but I liked the views and the rocks. At some point we deviated off the route and ended up in Boulder. This was okay because we had a chance to gas up and stop at a grocery store for ice and last minute supplies. Next we headed up to Estes Park area, via the detour. At this point the night was getting awefully close and we didn't have a good map for finding a campsite. Finally we happened across the Meeker Park Overflow campground north of Allenspark. This turned out to be a pretty sweet little campsite with lots of trees and space. It was nearly full by the time we got settled. Damp firefood resulted in a pretty sad dinner on the stove. We were tired. The view in the morning was spectacular:

Which was only made mroe incredible a couple miles up the road when you find out that the peak above is not the main attraction:

But that is tomorrows story!