We took a short road trip in the RV in July, 2016. Our friends, Kim and Al, full timers, spend the summer in Southern Colorado. They are also avid geocachers. They were going to a big geocaching event at Littleton, CO and wanted us to come. I knew I could never get Denny to go all that way for a weekend, so I planned a month long adventure. I included a place he had been wanting to go to for a long time as an extra incentive. To my amazement, he agreed right away. Could have blown me over with a feather, I was shocked. The reason he agreed so quickly is that he thought it would be a good 70th birthday present for me. I had given him a 75th birthday party the year before. He thought he should do something for my 70th, but he would have no idea how to plan a party, so when I brought this trip up, he jumped on it. I would rather have a month long road trip than a party anytime.
The first scary thing that happened is that we had a tire blowout going down the road at 60MPH. It happened on I-82 outside of Prosser, WA. The road was pretty rough, but we thought it was because they had grooves in the pavement, but we didn't remember being quite so rough. When we got past it, the tire blew. Luckily there was a big enough space to pull over. The tire was toast. Denny put on the spare and we went to Costco to get a new one. The luckiest thing is that there was actually a big enough space in the parking lot to pull over our rig. They gave us a new one and we were on the road again. It only put us back 1.5 hrs, so we felt lucky.
We left June 26th and got to Montrose, CO. on June 30th. We visited for a day and left for Littleton, CO. on Friday. The mega event was held Saturday. Had a lot of fun meeting fellow cachers. Even saw some cachers I knew from Seattle. People come from all over the world to go to these mega events.
On the way there, we stopped at Pikes Peak. We had never been there. It is over 14,000 ft. It was quite the road up there. It is a paved, but very curvy and steep with lots of switchback turns. The scariest thing is that there are no guardrails. YIKES!!
It was very cloudy so we didn't really get to see much at the top. Only on the way down did the clouds dissipate enough to see, but really no safe place to pull over for pictures. Denny took this picture of my friend Kim and I finding a geocache. If it looks like I'm clinging to the rock for dear life, I was. It was very steep.
After the event, we went back down to Montrose for another week. Kim and Al do LOTS of off-road 4x4 trails. They asked us if we were afraid of heights and we said no. Didn't realize why they asked us that. We went offloading 3 times. Very scary, but exciting. Off roading in the Colorado Rockies is quite the adventure. We went directly over the top of mountains, all above 12,000'. We were above the snow and tree line. We can cross it off our bucket list, eventho it was never really on it. Ha. The trails are very narrow. If you have a 4X4 coming the other way, you both have to get over to the edges as far as possible. If you are on the outside, it is very scary because the drops are steep at 100-500' down. Sometimes we came within inches of the edge.😱 Pictures can't really do it justice, but here are a few. In the pictures, the roads look a lot wider than they really are.
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