Road Trip

We were sore the next morning.  I figured I should give Vicki a rest, and frankly, I didn't mind.  There had been some mention that getting up early and hitting trails wasn't exactly her idea of a vacation, as much as she was enjoying it.

We'd brought some pancake mix that you just add water to ... must've had cinnamon and nutmeg in the mix, too.  I mixed that up and heated the syrup in a pan of boiling water (I don't like cold syrup), and then cooked up the pancakes on our new cast-iron grill on the Coleman stove.

It's the gasoline kind -- a true dual fuel stove (Coleman 424). I like several things about it.  #1, it's old-school.  I like old-school. I burn white gas in it, but it will also burn unleaded gas.  I like that option.  I also have a propane adapter so we can use propane if we want.  One of the main things, though, is you can tell how much fuel you have left.  I can pick up the tank and feel how full (or not) it is.  Propane's a lot more iffy.

They were very good.  We'd been turned on to the Kodiak gourmet brand by some friends, but I couldn't find it in any local stores.  Plus online it was like $17 for a box.  I found this brand at HyVee for $3.28.  I can't remember off the top of my head what it was.

So something easy today.  I'd never been to Lily Lake, and I never realized it was right off of the road.  It's outside the fee area of the park, but I think it may now technically be a part of the park.  It has a trail all the way around it, and we took it.

You could see Longs and Meeker looming up to the south, with Estes Cone close by.  And there were cattails in a marsh on the south end and families of ducks in the water. Some of them were diving for food. Wildflowers and pines all around it.  Lots of people stop here, apparently.  The parking lot was overflowing.  Can't get over all the families we saw on this trip.  That's a great thing.  Lots of kids.

But what to do after that?  We planned Thursday to be a town day because it was forecast to be the most likely day for rain - so we didn't want to do that.  So we decided to drive down to St. Malo's in Meeker Park to my favorite little church.  Vicki had seen it before, but it's always a nice spot to visit, and 7 is a scenic highway.

Right away I noticed the pond that is normally around the church was empty.  Closer inspection of the roadbed revealed why.  This is where 7 was washed out in the flood last year.  Wow.  It was mostly cleaned up and the road was repaired ... I can only assume they'll let the pond re-fill... but it did show starkly how Estes Park and a few other communities up there had been cut off by the floods that stormy week.

It's not nearly as photogenic without the pond ... so what to do now?

Well how far is Nederland?

GPS said 20 miles.  So we started out.  And when we'd gotten to the end of that 20 miles I realized that it was 20 miles ... to the TURNOFF.  It was another 20 miles to Nederland.  Oh well.   We've come this far.

I once read in a guide to Colorado's mountain towns that Nederland is where all the hippies from Boulder moved when they got priced out of the real estate market.   Probably an apt description.  And have we mentioned yet that this was my first trip to Colorado since pot was legalized?  If you're going to see a store anywhere, you're going to see one in Nederland.  Sure enough, Vicki spotted a sign right downtown advertising "Fine Canabis" (The Canary's Song?).   No, we didn't stop and buy any.  :-)  But we did go to Kathmandu, an Indian Nepali buffett ... which was very good.  We ended up parking near another interesting place, "The Ned Center" .... which I assume was for medical marijuana before it was legalized for recreational use.  But I could be wrong.

At any rate, the food at Kathmandu was very good, and I don't think it had anything to do with a haze of smoke over Nederland ... it's just good.  No, really.

The coffee shop in a railroad car that Mark and I had stopped in back in '07 has been bought out, I'm sure much to the dismay of the purists.

We headed back to Estest Park.  I wanted to stop at a hardware store to find some screws to replace some screws on the camper that had somehow gone missing and pick up a card to mail to Pam and John for their 40th anniversary.  It started to rain rather heavily after we picked these things up ... and Vicki spotted a sign that said "You Need Pie".

Vicki likes pie.  A lot.  A place that specializes in pie?  We're in.

They were out of pie.  Guess we got there too late.  Seriously.  Don't tempt people with pie if you don't have pie.

Back to the park.  Back to the campground.  But first, we stopped at the Moraine Park ranger station/lodge.  I picked up a  Colorado Geology book there to read in the rain if it kept raining tonight, and perhaps tomorrow.  Vicki already had books.  It became a running joke that week that we'd get to that place within 20 minutes of closing time.  It closes at 4:30.  Even if we weren't going there, we'd note the time when we drove by it.

We had new neighbors at the campground.

Saw a Cardinals Baseball shirt on one of the ladies, heard a game in the background, Missouri plates and a Joe Machens plateholder - they were from New Bloomfield -- less than 30 miles driving from Columbia.  Small world.

We had another of the famous flavored rice dinners, and sat and relaxed in front of the camper ... Vicki was reading, and I was picking on my little guitar... and three antlered deer wandered into the campground, grazing, and generally unconcerned with anyone who wasn't moving fast.  Which was pretty much nobody.  They posed for pictures for lots of campers in the waning sunlight.

Ended up going to bed around 10.  There was a little rain overnight, but not much.  Didn't really need the heater that night.