Estes Park was a lot of fun and we can see why so many people use this town as a base for exploring the Rocky Mountains. It has a really nice main street with a lot of different shops and plenty of bars and restaurants to keep you going for a few days. We especially enjoyed the Jerky shop, which had hundreds of different flavours of Jerky, each one with free samples. We tried nearly every flavour, even the super hot Carolina Reaper one (where I ran around the shop waving a hand in front of my mouth calling for water). We ended up buying three bags of Jerky to enjoy later in the trip.
Salt Water Taffy also seemed to be big in Estes Park, with a number of shops showing it being made in the window. Neither of us were up for sweets so this will have to be something we try another time.
We took a short drive to the Stanley Hotel which is also in Estes Park. Stephen King and his wife visited this hotel and this inspired his 1977 best-selling novel The Shining. It was also a filming location for Dumb and Dumber.
We had planned to go on the Estes Park Aerial Tramway which is a bubble lift up to the summit of Prospect Mountain but when we arrived, the queue was huge and we were told it was a 40 minute wait to board at both the top and the bottom, we didn't want to waste so much time so decided to give it a miss. Initially we were annoyed at ourselves for not getting there earlier but one of the employees told us that there was an even longer queue at 8:30am when it opened. Clearly a very popular attraction!
Instead, we walked back to the main street and on the way, stopped off at an amusement park where Lee went down a slide and we played a golf game where we won our newest member of the team, Eats! Eats was supposed to be named Estes but I kept getting the name of the town wrong so Lee decided to name him after my mistake!
After the very disappointing England game, which we watched in an Irish Bar, we headed into the Rocky Mountains National Park.
The Rocky Mountains NP is breathtaking! We took the Trail Ridge Road, also known as the Highway to the Sky, which goes from Estes Park in the East to Grand Lake on the West. The road starts at the valley floor where you see fields of grass, lakes and even the odd sheep, then the road climbs 4,000 feet through the tree line and up to the tundra. You feel like you have driven to the top of a mountain and the views are breathtaking. If you look closely in the pictures, you can even see where we started our drive, right at the bottom of the valley.
We only did one short hike whilst in the Rocky Mountains National Park, Tundra World Nature Trail which took about 15 minutes and walks through the Tundra landscape to a beautiful outlook.
We reached the end of the drive at Grand Lakes were we camped for the night in Elk Creek Campground but I am going to cover more on that in the next blog.
Yay good to see the Spurs top get an outing and the Roclies section fo the video had a banging tune for soundtrack which (to me anyway) has a vocal track that sounds like 'yid army' COYS
ReplyDeleteThe first part in Estes looked fun and Eats is cute, I liked the Overlook hotel from the Shining too and Lee on the slide - what a big kid, good that the attendant kept an eye on him.
The scenery for the drive and pics of the mountains were stunning jigsaw/post card quality pics :-) I liked the sped up footage of you going out to the lookout point although not convinced there were dangerous snow fields. A few additional bits of wildlife this vid too; bighorn, deer and chipmunk.
Looking forward to the next update, WiFi, power and time permitting!!