A Quick Update

Hi again everyone,

Welcome back to our continuing adventures in the USA. Last Monday I had to be in Colorado for work so we took the opportunity to get out of Gillette on Friday afternoon and drove south towards Denver. We stayed at a great place called Fort Collins about an hour north of Denver. It's a university town with lots of nice bars and clubs and we had a great night there. Unfortunately the weather wasn't on our side for once and we had our first real rainfall since we had arrived in the US.
We stayed in a relly nice hotel called Armstongs; thoroughly recommend it if anyone is over this way.




On Saturday we drove up to Estes Park at the entrance to the Rocky Mountain National Park. It was another really nice spot but it was snowing so heavily that it was hard for us to do anything. We tried to go into the park but the rangers were warning unessential travellers not to enter because of the road conditions. We didn't need to be told twice so turned around and drove into Denver.
In Denver on Saurday night we managed to visit a couple of the nice places we went to on our first visit way back in November. Went to a nice jazz club but have now decided we're not as much into jazz as we thought we were.

On Sunday we left Denver on route to Craig around the bottom of the national park. We had to go up across the Rockies and it was pretty spectacular. Lots of snow and wonderful scenery; we got as high as 11,000 ft which was a long way up.
We stopped for lunch at a place called Grand Lake. During summer it must be a great place fo boating but right now it's just a very large ice cube. The lady where we had lunch told us they drive a fire engine out there at Christmas and that the ice is 6 - 8 feet thick.




After Grand Lake we continued on to Steamboat Springs; a great ski resort on the west side of the Colorado Rockies. Unfortunately we hadn't packed our ski gear but we did manage a ride to the top of the mountain in the gondola.




On Wednesday night we began to experience some of the weather that Wyoming is famous for. After having basked in the sunshine for a couple of weeks, winter was back with vengence after a winter storm parked on top of us and dumped about 4 ft of snow. Travelling to work on Thursday morning was a nightmare and by lunch time they had declared a level 3 emergency in the area, closed all the mines and sent us home. Today (Friday) it's beautiful sunshine again but we are locked in the house because of the snow. Hopefully they will have cleared it enough buy tonight that we can get the car out and get to the shops. We may head back to Fort Collins again tomorrow if the forecast stays ok.




I've added an album of all the latest photos; not a lot but hope you enjoy them.
Click on the following picture.

Until next time.

A bit of everything