Road Trip!!

Wow, it’s been way too long since I’ve updated my poor neglected blog. I wish I had an excuse as to why it’s been so long but I kind of lost my desire to write for a while but I’m back and ready to give it another try! Hopefully there are still a few people out there willing to spend a few minutes reading the nonsense that I write.

I was originally going to make this post about autumn in Colorado but when I started taking the pictures (and yes there are a LOT of pictures) I decided to just make it about my road trip in general. My sister Robin and I decided to spend the day in Estes Park taking a lot of pictures, looking at the fall colors and hopefully spotting some of the wildlife in Rocky Mountain National Park. If Estes Park sounds familiar to you then it’s probably because that it’s the location of the Stanley Hotel (more on that later) which was the basis for Stephen King’s novel The Shining. You may have also seen it on Ghost Hunters on Syfy. If you haven’t seen it let me give you just a taste.

While I didn’t get the chance to actually go into the hotel I did get some pictures, but your gonna have to wait. Patience Grasshopper!

So to get to Estes Park from where I live you have to go through the town of Loveland. Okay, technically you don’t have to go through there but if you don’t where else are you gonna see the Statue of Liberty? Aside from New York and Las Vegas that is.

She got tired of New York and relocated to Colorado

Loveland’s actually a cool little town. Their biggest claim to fame is that around Valentine’s Day you can actually mail your sweetheart’s card there and have it re-sent to them with a Loveland postmark. I’ve never actually done it but I’ve heard about it on the news. And as Facebook has taught us, if it’s on the news it must be true! Speaking of, if you don’t read this blog and pass it on to 25 of your friends someone , somewhere will do something bad and probably charge your credit card for midget porn or something.  It was on the news! I swear!

Other than the Statue of Liberty there’s sadly not much to see in Loveland. It’s a nice little town and all but it’s not an entertainment hotspot or anything. Once you get past Loveland thoughyou can stop at the Dam Store. No seriously, that’s it’s name! The Dam Store! I have proof!

Why is it called the Dam Store? Well that’s easy! It’s next to a dam! And it has a tower that you can climb to take pictures of said dam!

Not really much to look at I know but it does have a nifty sign! Oh and these last two pictures were taken from the tower. And now the sign!

Yeah not really a whole lot to it to be honest. It is dam related and has the Dam Store name on it though! Your right enough about that. And honestly who want’s to see a Dam map when you can see things like this?

                   

Granted they’re both shots of the same spot but I liked it so much I had to shoot it twice! And think of it this way, your left eye can look at one and your right eye can look at the other!

So we left the Dam store and were heading up to Estes Park when I saw a sign that caught my attention.

But what really caught my eye was their choice in advertising. No, not the sign, these.

   You can’t see it from this picture but the “girl” on the left is wearing sheer panties. I wish I was kidding.  My sister and I thought they were real people when we first drove by but instead they were what we called the “Hoochie mannequins”.

We eventually got into Estes Park proper and I knew I had to get at least a few pictures of the Stanley Hotel.

I think there was some kind of event going on at the Stanley the day we were there because it was packed! There were cars parked everywhere and still more looking for places to park. One of these days I’m planning on staying a night at the Stanley just to say that I have. On the Stanley hotel’s website they actually offer a Ghost stay package. You can spend the night and even get your own EMF detector to keep afterwards. They also do ghost hunting tours as well if your feeling brave enough.

In case you thought I was exaggerating about how crowded it was, let me show you something.

Okay so it doesn’t really give that great of an idea of how crowded it was but trust me, it was.

We decided to try to avoid traffic and take the side streets to get to Estes Park and that’s when we came across this.

Little did we know that this would be about the only real wildlife we would see all day and they were camped out in someone’s front yard!

We finally made it into Rocky Mountain National park and from here on out I’m gonna keep my commentary to a minimum and let the pictures speak for themselves. Click any picture to embiggen it.

  

The pictures below were taken at two miles above sea level. We were pretty high up but were gonna go higher.

With these next pictures we were officially above the tree line. There was a sign that said we were entering an Arctic Tundra climate. Sadly I didn’t get a picture of the sign but it wasn’t that exciting anyway.

The picture above is probably my favorite one of the bunch. I have to give a big thank you to my sister Robin for taking it for me.

The one above and the ones that follow were taken on the way back down the mountain. I thought they came out really well and had to include them in the post as well.

Well that wraps up my most recent road trip. I hope you enjoyed the pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them. I hope you at least made it this far into the post too! I know it was very photo heavy but I had to share. Also fair warning, I have one(or possibly two) more travel blog coming. Of course you don’t have to read it but I do plan on being better about updating my poor neglected site. I’m also planning a review of the Star Wars blurays. Not that anyone really probably cares but I’m gonna do it anyway. Because I can.

Thank you all (six of you) for reading and I should have another post soon!