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!!!

 

Day 15: Great Sand Dunes

We enjoyed nice breakfast with some green chili sauce in a burrito and cranberry juice. We took also few banana's for the road, which was a nice addition for the non-fruit holiday so far. We left Santa Fe and set the course towards our first real National Park - the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado. After passing the state border of New Mexico and Colorado the scenery changed to include snow-topped mountains and valleys. We reached the Rocky Mountains area.

The Great Sand Dunes was beautiful. It is a big sand dune area by the side of the mountains. When we drove to the entrance, we were told that it is nice "Visit National Parks for free" week. Excellent! Six dollars saved! The dutch person was very happy and said we should now visit as much National Parks as we can ;)

King of the hill (or dune)

Reflections

Well relaxed travelers :)

Dunes & perfect weather

Walking in the stream

Overview of the dunes

We walked in the dunes for few hours and got somewhat an idea what it would be like in the Sahara. Extremely hot sand, with very deceptive distances (looked short, felt long!). We climbed on top of one of the dunes, and A got an idea what it is like to be an asthmatic. Even though it was only aroud 2,6 km in altitude, you could already feel the oxygen levels decreasing. The landscape was breathtaking, with big dunes surrounded by snowy mountains. There was a small river also, which apparently can be much bigger but this year there was not so much snow. The only thing missing were sliders, so we could've do some sand dune downhill sliding :)

After the National Park we headed off to Colorado Springs. The drive took us through beautiful Alps-like scenery with the max altitude of 2850 km. Also our car is maybe designed more for the beach boulevards of Florida than mountain roads in Colorado. Luckily the drivers are excellent ;)

There are over 100 satellite radio channels with very clear descriptions of the content, as you can see below :-) We have usually either some pop thing or news (which are quite amazing with the republican minded channels).

We checked in to a Travelodge motel that was both cheap and good, the best price-quality ratio so far. There was even a pool table which we used in th evening, R ending up winning both times. Grrr... We seriously wonder how they make money here. It seems also the further north we go, the cheaper the accomodation. Ipad has a nice Tripadvisor app, which we have used often to find places to go, eat and sleep. This time it suggested that within 0,5 mile there's a really good Rudy's bbq place. It was interesting system, we went to a line and first there was a big pool filled with ice full of drinks. We picked up lemonande and beer for the beer drinker and headed onwards. Then there was a shelf fol cold starters. We took some potato salad and coleslaw and moved on.

Then we got to the cashier, and we said we are first time here. The cashier provided samples of the different meat they have and told what are the most popular ones. We took some roasted beef and pork ribs accompanied with green chillistew and one corn. The food was ok, but we hope still to find better bbq in the future :) also even with the smallest portion sizes we could not finish everything.

 

Day 13-14: Texas, New Mexico

We started Friday with our first pancake breakfast during the holiday. And they were really good! With that breakfast we could easily manage until late dinner :) our first stop was the laundry place. It was surprisingly expensive (around 10$ for washing all our stuff) and we were thinking that it would be quite easily justified just to buy your own washing machine instead of going to a laundry place once a week. R was also the only man there, and we felt ourselves very modern when he started to fold the laundry, and probably the others thought "poor guy" :)

This sounds like our road!

Our target was a National Park just outside of Fredericksburg. While driving there, the weather started to be a bit bad and by the time we were at the gates, there was a thunderstorm. Not the ideal day for hiking then. We turned back and spotted some kind of moose-like animal by the side of the road. Our leading zoologist is still debating with himself, what the animal exactly was.

We decided to make it a driving day instead, and set the course for Roswell, New Mexico. We decided to spend the night in Middletown/Odessa. Which turned out to be a baaaad idea. All the hotels were crazy expensive, and the town was full of little oil pumps and nothing interesting to see. It turned out to be the hometown of George and Laura Bush, which also maybe explains their oil connections. We finally ended up in a super-8 motel, paying way too much and being in a room which obviously had seen its best days. We heard, that during the week all the hotels/motels are usually reserved for the oil workers, but they go back to their families for the weekend.

On Saturday we thought that let's leave as soon as possible away from there. We crossed the border of New Mexico and the landscape changed a lot. Big plateaus of nothing basically, and where Texas had an oil pump here and there, in New Mexico we first saw none. Later on, we started to see mini oil pumps, which could be fitted to somebody's back yard.

Driving & relaxing :)

We drove to Roswell, no sign of aliens though. We went to a local UFO museum, but it did not convince us of a UFO really landing to Roswell, it was fun though :) we grabbed some lunch and headed onwards to Santa Fe. The drive was roughly 170 miles of straight road with barely visible signs of human life. Luckily we had gotten some gas before this. We came to Santa Fe, and found a really nice Inn just outside of down town.

New Mexico landscape

We decided to go to the city, which is one of the oldest capitols of the US. It was probably the closest you can get to Mexico without going there. It felt like coming to a pueblo 100 years ago. Santa Fe has a central square, where was performing a group with xylophone's playing samba. It was really cool. After listening for a while, we went to get some dinner. No wonder Santa Fe is one of the most popular travel destinations in the southwest USA. Really nice place!

We found a labyrinth, and of course we needed to solve it

Dinner on a Obama table

Our sleeping place

With the speed we are proceeding, we could probably go to Canada and back without problems :) therefore we are hoping soon to find some hiking areas where we could spend few days. Next up - Colorado!

 

Day 11-12: Texas continues

After a nice mexican breakfast (the leftovers from yesterday) we left our tobacco-smelling non-smoking room and headed off towards a Natural Forest area. We were feeling we really good use some hiking in the forest after all the decadence. We drove through beautiful Texan countryside, top down, +30 degrees Celsius and no worry in the world. Our trusted navigator guided us to a "Scenic road" which turned out to be a bumpy unpaved road with lots of dirt. While the driver was focusing keeping us on the road, the passenger focused on spotting deer-like animals in the forest.

After some driving around we found the starting place for the hiking routes. Unfortunately, it had been closed few weeks ago with an official order. The reason was that it was too dry and at the same time too rainy.. Puzzled by this advice we thought maybe today is not our hiking day. We headed off to a Monument Hill instead. The place combined two sights, a graveyard of Texas people from the 1800's who were shot in the war with Mexico and a big stone house and a private brewery built by a German settler in the end of the 19th century. We got to do some walking in the forest after all!

We ended up spending the night near Austin, Texas. We chose a Holiday Inn near the airport which meant airport prices. We asked for a price and the guy took a piece of paper where he wrote down the price. We were thinking whether this is some kind of an "offer you can't refuse" type of thing. R took his best sad face and said that unfortunately that is somewhat over our target (100$/night). The guy then asked us to wait for a minute to see what he can do. After serving another customer he said he could get us in with a discount rate by giving us a room meant for "American Airlines distressed". The only condition was that if anyone asks, we needed to say we are stranded by an airline :-) so again we got nice 20$ off from the room price.

The hotel incuded a happy hour with snacks and free drinks and of course we needed to use the amenities all our money's worth ;) the room was the biggest and nicest room so far, and we even did some evening swimming. A chose the big pool, which was probaly 15 degrees colder than the other one. Well, it got our blood circulating again!

On Thursday we headed to the State Capital, Austin. That was a really cool city! We could've easily stayed there for longer, but all the hotels downtown were either full or crazy expensive. We checked out the Capitol Hill, which was B-I-G. We walked up and down the streets of Austin for hours, and thought that this is a bit like the San Francisco of Texas. People were fit, restaurants served organic food, all kinds of hippies were here and there and there was a nice street with all kinds of bars, music clubs etc. if it would be closer to Europe, it would be a nice place for a weekend getaway.

In Austin is also a famous bat bridge. For some reason bats are liking one particular bridge there, and the live under it. Every evening it is a huge tourist entertainment to see the bats fly out for their nightly food hunt. We did not stick around for that long, but we walked under the bridge anyhow and heard some bat noises. Of course after this we had the Batman theme singing in our heads for a while..

After Austin we decided to drive to Fredericksburg. A city about 100km off from Austin was founded by German settlers and is also the birth place of a famous character of WW2 history, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. The main street of Fredericksburg is full of small shops, biergartens and other restaurants. We got the cheapest motel room so far (45$) just around the corner of the where the action is. We ended up sitting in a beerhouse with 100+ beers on the selection and a Texas blues/country singer performing, sitting outside and enjoying the perfect weather under a big . Again, a really nice city picked totally randomly from the map!

P.S. we got the car oil changed in Nederland, so that has been taken care of as well :)