Thursday; miles traveled today…maybe 50 paved, maybe 15 on rugged rocks & dirt? Highest elevation maybe 9000’.
We slept in this morning which was nice. We had a real breakfast at a little local bakery and cafe called NotchTop. It was really a busy place, and the food was really good. When we finished, we went and strolled around the town of Estes Park. It is a touristy town. I figure that it is at the base of the Rocky Mountain National Park, and there is a lot of winter activities around here. It is like base camp for all of the Coloradoites that come from Denver, Boulder, etc. There was a little farmer’s market set up that we walked around. Then – at 12:30, we checked in at Estes Park ATV. We had reservations for a 3 hour ride today. We got the paperwork done, got our helmets, instructions, safety, and directions on where to go to the trial head, which was about 20 miles out of town.
We drove on down there, got assigned our Kawasaki side-by-side, got a map and final instructions, and we were on our way. This was a do-it-yourself tour. We could go where ever we wanted on the trail system. We just had to be back in 3 hours. SWEET!
This looked easy.
Captain was looking so serious in his awesome helmet!
Pretty soon, we found some more challenging terrain. The map they gave us showed the easy/moderate/difficult trail roads. This was still the easy/moderate one.
And so of course, we decided to take one of the difficult trails. Everything was dry – we never encountered any wet spots on the road, so rock climbing wasn’t a slippery adventure.
It was challenging to find a trail through some of these rock piles!
I am just amazed at how this machine just crawled over everything. We did scrape the belly a couple of times.
Kenny did a great job navigating us across and through some really gnarly areas! We went up a difficult trail that was supposed to have a jet crash. We never found the jet. We kept watching the time and thought we better turn back. It was some pretty technical driving up here!
Here we are! This is what the old folks were up to today!
We had a fun day. Kenny’s hands were tired after 3 hours of man handling the steering wheel. When we were done, we just parked the machine back with the company, and hopped in our car. We didn’t have to go back to Estes Park, so we headed to Lyons and went to Oskar Blues for some food and refreshment. It is known for some really good beers in the beer world. I had a delicious burger! YUM! And Kenny had a pulled pork sandwich with a couple of good dark beers. Then – back to Estes Park to get cleaned up and relax. Ahh – a fun day!
Tomorrow, we start heading south! Still more Colorado adventures to come, though.