A week and 2 days off work and one of the most spectacular states to explore - looking forward to this. Here's some of the the route we covered during our stay, basically Boulder up to Estes park, then down all the way to Colorado Springs and back to Denver.
Day ZeroAfter a bit of a delay we finally got to Denver just before midnight - you can tell it's a ski destination as the whole airport is set up to handle vast numbers of skis and snowboards.
In the early hours while we were taking the shuttle bus to the car hire location Andy spotted that the man we were sitting next to had a Smashburger logo on his bag. If you've never had a Smashburger before I'd suggest you give it a go immediately. The key differences are that their buns actually taste of something other than packing material and the burgers are all 1/3 or 1/2 pound, plus all their milkshakes are made with Haagen Danz ice cream so they're really, really good - albeit not the sort of thing you can even dream of as part of any calorie controlled diet. So I commented on how good their burgers were and where I'd had one (New Jersey airport) it turns out that the guy was their Director of Field Operations and gave us a bunch of free vouchers :-) Apparently Smashburger originated in Colorado so he was heading back to their corporate office.
It was good that we had a perk up as we were about to enter one of the most evil places on the planet - the car rental office. I'm no newbie at this and I'd organized the rental and paid in advance but I still get nervous every time I go in as their cunning schemes to steal your money get ever more elaborate or just plain wrong. Take one of the classic moves - extra money for another driver. I'm the named driver which means that I'm in a higher risk category than Andy plus if I'm the only driver then it's more likely that I'll get tired and have an accident. However the extra driver is $10/day - what planet does that make sense on other than the profiting the shareholders planet. They even agreed with me that it would be safer to have two drivers but honestly at gone midnight I wasn't in the mood for arguing -for more than a couple of minutes at least. The next one is that you have to pre-purchase a tank of fuel, yet another pickpocketing masked as a,a - in fact I'm not even sure how they spin this one. This basically means that unless you run out of gas as you pull in to return the car you're filling the car up for them. I'm cautiously optimistic that the marketing genius who came up with that one will be reserved a special place in hell heated by the millions of gallons of excess fuel that has been left in rental cars over the years.
Last con, this one not strictly speaking the car rental firm's fault. The toll road around Denver is the issue this time when they want $70 to pay the toll in advance - $70. $70!!!! What is that about. Anyway the car company try telling us that this is pretty essential but Andy checks the timings to Boulder and finds that the toll road saves us just 4 minutes -which I reckon works out at $1,150/hour.
We made it to the hotel around 1am, kids are troopers and side from Becky falling asleep on the floor of the airport haven't slept and are in remarkably good spirits still. 1t hotel is a LaQuinta, one of our favourite low budget options. Pros: cheap, decent pillows, quiet,open air pool, free internet and inclusive breakfast. Cons: Very basic
Day 1 - Boulder
No plans when we wake up so I gave one of the guys at work who commutes from Colorado to Minneapolis most weeks a call and got a couple of recommendations and off we set - first stop Flagstaff mountain. This is a mountain just outside Boulder that we went for a drive up with a short hike at the end. The hike was lovely but the signs for bears at the top freaked the kids out a bit so we didn't do as much hiking as we might have planned - still some great views with an amphitheater that looks out over Boulder .
Can you spot Dan and Becky in this one?
After the hike we did a bit of swimming/splashing at the hotel outdoor pool before heading into downtown Boulder. It's slightly bizarre I have to say, it's like an alternate reality where carbon fiber was discovered before iron - all the bikes are carbon fiber, even the ones that people leave chained up with bits of wet string outside shops. Also, and here is one of the things that is weird things for someone from England about Minnesota - in Minnesota, people use bikes for 2 things, recreation or fitness. People never use them as a form of transport to actually get somewhere they might want to go. In Colorado, you see people using them as a form of transport and it just feels right. Of course more than anywhere else in the US you also see the extreme cyclists, people who think nothing of taking on a 6,000ft ascent to 14,000+ feet to see what the view is like compared to yesterday. A ton of Olympic athletes live here too as the altitude helps with training so it's a pretty sporty place.
Boulder, also unlike Minneapolis, has also got a fantastic town center for walking around. Lots of unique shops and restaurants in the downtown Pearl St Mall, a good vibe and a super cool interactive toy shop all make this one of the absolute best small towns, in fact probably the best small town we've been to in our travels so far.
Becky in the 'British Section' of one of the boutique shops - how we miss some of these things!
We also got a phenomenal thunderstorm just as we were looking for somewhere to eat, apparently they got record rain just before and during our stay, always in the afternoon or evening which didn't really affect us too much but had the fortunate side effect of swelling the rivers and waterfalls to record levels for this time of year.
