I'm continuing the last few posts from Colorado so I will have memories of them! Plus if anyone is planning a trip to these areas - maybe these posts will help. One of my FAVORITE things to do is plan trips. I love finding the local spots and things to do.
We left Wednesday morning and drove to Estes Park. It took about 2.5 hours. We couldn't get into our condo until the afternoon so we drove around town a a little and then stopped to eat lunch at Bird and Jim. If you go to Estes Park - this is my #1 recommendation. It was so pretty inside but the food was AMAZING!! Best meal we had all week. Hands down.
We had a leisurely lunch. We enjoyed it so much.
Can you see the fire in the distance? There was a wildfire not far from Estes Park and it was so windy which was making it worse. In fact, the day after we left - they starting evacuating the area. It's STILL bad and I'm praying for the snow they are supposed to get today. They need it desperately. We fell in LOVE with the area so I'm so sad that it's affecting them so badly right now.
We checked into our condo. I will link it below. It was PERFECT. Really cute. Not a big condo but it worked great for us and we were so glad to have two bathrooms after being in a hotel room for a few days. The best part was it was literally about a 2 min walk to downtown. We put our stuff up and walked downtown.
Downtown Estes Park is so cute. Lots of stores and restaurants. We had so much fun just looking around. We ate at a mexican restaurant that wasn't that great but none of us were really that hungry anyway.
It was just a magical day!
I was trying to figure out all the ways we could possible move to Estes Park at this point.
The next morning we went to Rocky Mountain National Park. It was FREEZING on this day! In case you don't know - all 4th graders get free passes for them and their families to all national parks for an entire year when they are in 4th grade. I'm so glad I knew this because it got us in free!
The first thing we did was walk around Bear Lake. It was sooooo pretty. We took a ton of pictures. WE didn't do any other hiking in RMNP because it was literally 23 degrees.
The masks we were wearing kept us warm so we weren't complaining this day! I always wanted the kids to take their masks off for pictures because I didn't want our vacation pictures to be full of masks but sometimes we just forgot.
Gosh I love these kids!
We actually left the park after Bear Lake and went back to Bird and Jim to eat lunch because it's so close and we wanted to eat there again. Then we came back to drive the Trail Ridge Road the rest of the afternoon.
I didn't realize we would literally be driving up mountains. My fear of heights gave me a lot of anxiety. We were almost as high as were on Pike's Peak a lot of this drive.
There was a lot of snow at the top. It was SOOOOO cold.
Some of the rivers were already freezing.
We didn't see a lot of wildlife in the park but we heard to go look at the Estes Park Golf Course and we were dying - look at all the Elk!
We went back downtown and bought as many things with CO on them as we could - hoodies, shirts, masks, hats. ha!
We ate dinner at Claire's. It was very good. We weren't super hungry after our lunch but we had a great dinner.
As we were walking back to our condo we saw this huge Elk just hanging out in town.
We had to take a picture with him.
This is our condo where we stayed. We loved it.
Sadly the next morning we started home. We decided last minute to go a different way after our long trip through Kansas and we also decided to break it into two days instead of 12 hours in one day. I wish we could have stayed in Estes Park longer but then again it was good timing since it evacuated. I hope Estes Park will be okay and if you want a fun place to visit - it's wonderful. And there is so much we didn't do. We only spent a little less than two days. I hope we will be back!
