Tuesday morning, we headed into the Rocky Mountain National Park. Had Shawn and I been alone, we would have just kept walking and stayed there! This is where I first fell in love with the mountains. I say how cheesy it sounds all of the time, but the mountains just feel like "home" to me. One day......
We took a great little (flat) hike to get us acclimated to the elevation some more.
Little boys following their big cousin.
Taking a snack break.
If the kids had their way, they would have stayed here and thrown rocks into the water all day.
After our hike, we headed up the mountain toward Estes Park for lunch. We found some elk along the way and stopped to get some photos. While the elk are cool, this is what I was staring at.
Great photo of the TN Capps Family!
We finally got to Estes Park and picked a Mexican restaurant that Shawn and I had eaten at when we vacationed here.
After lunch and shopping around town, we put our feet in the creek.
Before heading back we stopped at the Stanley Hotel, where Shawn and I stayed after his deployment in 2009.
This is a picture of us from then, when Caleb was just a baby.
Amelia wanted to know where she was when we were here last :o)
The fastest way to get back to the cabin was to go back through the park...darn! Even though signs were posted to not play in the snow, we broke the rules to freeze ourselves.
We stopped at the Alpine Visitors center before heading back down the mountain.
The visitor center is at 11,796 ft, but you get much higher than that in other spots. We were all still struggling to breath.
Just before the Continental Divide pull off, we spotted some more elk. I left the frame of the window in the picture so that you could see just how close they were.
Just before heading out of the park, we came upon a group of people pulled off the side of the road. That can only mean one thing, they had found more wild animals.
If you look just in the center of these photos you can see a black dot. It was a black bear! We would have stayed longer and followed him some more, but we were being shooed along by the park ranger.
Day 4 complete! At this point, Holly had been in the local ER 2 or 3 times...I lost count. Her hives are still out of control and now she's having trouble breathing. No one can figure out what's going on. To say the least, their vacation is not going as planned, she's miserable and they just want to go home. Overnight she gets worse and heads to the ER again first thing in the morning...but not before booking flights home for later that evening.
