Final Destination - Colorado Springs

August 3, 2010; Colorado Springs. We arrived in our new home town of Colorado Springs today, and settled into a campsite at The Garden of the Gods Campground. We had a very relaxing evening sharing dinner and hanging around our campfire at our campsite. We have traveled just under 5,000 miles and have visited or passed through 20 states since our voyage began on June 12th. Wesley says he could do this forever. I think the rest of us are ready to settle down for a while. Tomorrow we will go check out our new house to remember what it looks like and get an idea of where to put furniture, etc. The kids haven't seen the house yet. We will also do other errands like buy a washer and dryer, pay some bills, and research where to service and store our RV. Most likely we will unfortunately have to put "the Beast" up for sale, but since it will likely take a while to sell it, we plan to use it at least monthly and it will also be available for lease if anyone is interested. We will stay in our campsite tomorrow night again. On Thursday all of our furniture will be delivered. We'll spend one final night in the campground since the move is scheduled for two days and we don't know when beds and stuff will be set up. Then on Friday we'll move in and unpack the RV for the official end of one journey and beginning of another.

Rocky Mountain National Park

July 28 - Aug 2; The Rockies. The pass through Cheyenne, Wyoming was a bit disappointing so we didn't stop there but headed straight into Colorado. We were headed to Estes Park just outside of the Rocky Mountain National Park. We spent a few days there, using our camp site as our base camp. Wesley and I played a lot of horse shoes; we enjoyed some group campfires; and we enjoyed the beautiful mountain scenery around us. For two days, we visited the national park. On the first day we climbed to the highest point (by car), which is over 12,000 feet. We did a bit of climbing on foot. The kids' favorite climb was alongside a beautiful waterfall. On the second day, we went all the way to the other side to the small village of Grand Lake where we had lunch and homemade ice cream and did some fishing. On the trip back over, we saw many more animals than previously, primarily elk. We got out of our car for some great pictures of a large male elk crossing the road, and later pulled over alongside a small group of elk that were literally three feet from our car.