after rocky mountain national park, we stayed a few days in denver, catching up on laundry, groceries, and visiting a few friends. and then we started the long trek back home. originally, we had planned to take our time getting home, with several longer stops through the midwest, but as covid picked up, especially in […]
hazel
rocky mountain national park.days four and five. low key. hike free.
our big planned rocky mountain national park event with the grandlidboms was a drive along some of trail ridge road, aka: the highway to the sky. the road crosses (winds) through the park, maxing out at 12,186′ elevation, with breathtaking views in every direction. we fired up one of the guided tour apps and piled […]
rocky mountain national park.day three. sky pond solo hike.
with two solid kid hiking days in the books, and the grandlidboms in town, it was the perfect day for me to ditch everyone and tackle a longer, harder, and maybe way more awesome, solo hike. i woke up early and went outside to get some water for coffee and discovered we had some friendly […]
rocky mountain national park.day two. emerald lake.
i wasn’t kidding. after our 5.6 or so mile hike to mills lake on our first day, we turned around and hit the trails again on day two. the grandlidboms were set to arrive that night for a couple of days, so i wanted to cram in all the things i could before they were […]
rocky mountain national park.day one. mills lake hike.
when we came off the road in 2019, one of our regrets was that we never made it to rocky mountain national park. it was the one big park out west that we missed, but when we were in denver (in may 2017) there was a giant snow storm and most if it was closed. […]
torrington public pool.
our little layover campground between the black hills in custer and our upcoming week in rocky mountain national park was a city park in torrington, wyoming. the sites were $20 a night and there was a dump station and water and electric hookups and a level concrete pad. this alone made it so worth it. […]
fort laramie and the wyoming capitol.
whilst in torrington, we also made two wyoming based field trips. we were a little over an hour from cheyenne, so i figured we could kill a day by driving out to the capitol building. this was before i realized we would pass through cheyenne on our next travel day. oops. anyhow. we made the […]
nebraska national monuments.
after our lovely time in custer, south dakota, it was time to move on. we had a few days planned in torrington, wyoming, which was basically the halfway point between custer and our next big stop. to get there, we ended up driving down something like 25 miles of gravel road, mostly in nebraska. not […]
custer, south dakota miscellany.
we did a LOT while we were in custer. i didn’t even realize how much we kept on the go until i was composing all the posts for the things we did. but i also have a lot of fond memories of the downtime. the kiddos loved the little campground we stayed at. there was […]
the mammoth site.
for my last big adventure with the kiddos whilst in custer, south dakota, i dragged them all out to the mammoth site. it was about 45 minutes away, in hot springs, and we knew it would only take a couple of hours at most, so we were able to have a lazy morning. which means […]