Day 16: Garden of the Gods

Today was our second National Park/hiking day! We woke up with beautiful weather. We first headed to a nearby local park called the Garden of the Gods. Filled with big red rock formations it was really beautiful. We walked few hours up and down the trails. There were also people rock climbing, biking, walking with dogs etc. It would be nice to live close-by such a beautiful area.

We had quick sandwich lunch at Arby's (for moms: we don't eat unhealthy all the time ;) and drove off to Seven Falls. With more tourist-trap feeling and prices we decided to skip that one. Instead we drove through scenic mountain landscape to a petrified forest 30 miles west from Colorado Springs. The National Park consisted of group of petrified sequoia trees, that got hit by a lava flow 34 million years ago.

For the evening we first thought of heading to Aspen. Probably we are bit outside of season to spot all famous people skiing though. However the drive there takes quite some hours, so we decided to head off to another interesting place on the map. Nederland, Colorado! :)

The Rocky Mountains in the horizon

We were driving amazing route with the Rocky Mountains in front of us creating a beautiful post card scenery. We saw an advertisement for Colorado Land sellers. If we win the lottery, we will buy a piece of land here besides the mountains and become hermits :-)

Being modern settlers, we chose this plateau/small hill area for the place of our mountain house.

We drove through mountain roads and went as high as 3,5km. When driving into a tunnelmgoing through the mountains, there was just an accident in front of us and we faced our first real traffic jam. Luckily the delay was not much, and we reached our mountain lodge before 7 in the evening. The lodge is located across from the mountains in an altitude of 2,6km. It has a beautiful sunset view, and very hippie-like of feeling to it. This could be a really cool place during the winter with the slopes being 10 min drive away.

Sunset as seen from our hippie lodge

It is amazing to think that only two weeks ago we got the rental car and started our trip from Miami. And we still have 3 weeks to go before returning the car in San Francisco and enjoying few days. Nice!!!