Mary’s Lake Campground, Estes Park,
We woke up at 6am to Orr’s crying. Noting calmed her down and she woke Shir up too. Paola tended to them while I tried to sleep some more but in vain, too much noise. How Ron slept through this is unclear.
We left the campground before 9am for a long day of driving. Shir and Orr fell asleep immediately. Highway 24 took us north through Leadville, a town sitting at 10,200 feet. We drove on route 9 till we hit the main Interstate 70 and then stopped to refuel and rest at Dillon. We spent 20 minute in a reservoir where the kids ran to the lake to throw some rocks into the water. There was an elderly group of fishing ladies that let Ron and Shir take a close look at the one rainbow trout they had caught so far.
We continued northward on route 9, passing through Silverthorne and some beautiful houses and ranches along the way. All along we were escorted by the majestic snow capped peaks of the rocky mountain chain. We reached Kremmling (Sportsman’s Capital) around noon and had lunch in the RV. It was windy and eventually rainy outside.
We the drove eastward on route 40 until the turnoff to the west entrance to
We stopped near the park entrance and took a short half mile hike to
It was 3:30pm and we still had 40 miles of mountain driving inside the park to get to the eastern side and our campground. We drove no more than a mile before we saw to our left a herd of deer lazily munching on meadow grass. We stopped for the photo opportunity and the kids got a great view from the RV window. When we left 3 minutes later, there were at least 5 more cars parked in the temporary tourist attraction. We would see several more of these ad-hoc parking sites along the road.
The drive through the park was beautiful, reaching alpine heights of 12,000 feet, above the tree line. Snow in some places was several feet deep.
We reached the nice town of
In the past five days we drove almost 900 miles. It’s time to rest a bit. We’ll hang out here in the
Good night
Hemi