Pike's Peak - Colorado Springs, CO

WOW! 14,110 feet -- that's the elevation of Pike's Peak and we were up there! It took about an hour to get to the summit on the cog railway. We saw some Elk and Big Horn Sheep on the way up. The temperature at the base was about 86 degrees, but at the summit it was in the 50's and we saw patches of snow at the top.

While we were eating the famous Pike's Peak donuts and drinking our hot chocolate at the top, we saw a woman who had obviously hiked up to the summit with here two border collies. I can't even imagine hiking that far up!

We will be traveling to our last stop, Rocky Mountain National Park, Tuesday morning.

Grand Canyon

Our campsite inside the Grand Canyon National Park was really roughing it -- no WiFi! We headed out of the Grand Canyon Saturday morning and we arrived in Albuquerque, NM this evening, where they do have WiFi!

The Grand Canyon was breathtaking -- I found an alternate adjective to awesome!! It's so hard to realize how massive it is from pictures -- you just have to witness it in person. One of the highlights of visiting was seeing some California Condors flying above the canyon. We even got a couple of good pictures of them. Another highlight was seeing an Elk grazing through our campsite! Mike was walking Axel and almost ran into it -- luckily, Axel didn't even notice it. If he had, he probably would have growled and barked at it, waking up all of our campsite neighbors! We got a few great pictures of it too. Oh, and when we first arrived at the south rim trail, we encountered a very friendly squirrel -- he came VERY close to us, and I got a great picture!

Grand Canyon pics

Tomorrow on to Colorado Springs and Pike's Peak!

Bryce/Zion

Wow - these canyons are amazing!

We were REALLY high up above the canyon at Bryce -- I think the highest elevation was something around 9,000. We took a walk up to Inspiration Point and it was a difficult walk at that altitude -- but we made it. It was worth it -- the views were AWESOME. I think I've used that word too many times on this trip, but it's the only word that really fits!

Zion is different -- still lots of amazing rock formations, but we traveled down into the canyon here, so the views were opposite from Bryce. We drove through a 1 mile tunnel that they had to close down just for us (they do that or larger campers and RVs because the opening is very small).

I am in the process of uploading a bunch of pictures from both of these places on Snapfish -- I hope it works!

Bryce/Zion pictures on Snapfish

Cath: I saw a lizard and named him herb. i also want to go home, i miss my friends.

Pictures

Since our blog won't cooperate with uploading pictures, I opened a Snapfish account to post our pictures - please either click on the link below, or copy/paste the URL into your browser to view.

http://www2.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=236856820/a=135432801_135432801/t=135432801

Tetons

We visited Grand Tetons National Park for a couple of days and it is a BEAUTIFUL place.  As we were driving in from Yellowstone, I saw a grizzly bear!  Our campsite was right off of Jackson Lake in the woods.  It was a great site -- and while walking to the lake one day, I saw a fox run right in front of me!  We even took Axel down to the lake and let him splash around in the water -- he LOVED it!

We are now in Salt Lake City for a night on our way down to southern Utah to visit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks.

More later : )

Brian: I'm smarter than a bear.

Yellowstone

We've spent the past 3 days at Yellowstone -- what a huge, beautiful place! We have spent several hours driving around searching for wildlife -- we found elk, mule deer, a mountain goat, yellow-bellied marmots, a black bear and LOTS of buffalo. They are EVERYWHERE. We even saw 3 of them single-file walking against traffic up the road, but on the berm. We could have reached out and touched them as we drove past!

Pictures to Come - having technical difficulties

CAFFRIINNNEEEE! I'm baaaacckk! -I saw a prairie dog doing the wave. It was cool.

- Devil's Tower. We went on a hike - mom, dad, Bri, Axel, and myself. When we first got to the hiking entrance we saw a sign that read "WARNING rattlesnakes ahead please stay on the path" Really i don't know what mom and brian were thinking cause I'm not a big fan of things that slither and could potentially kill me, So we were walking and all of a sudden I heard a faint ssssssss, right when i heard that I said i have seen enough thank you come again , but no mom had to act all big and bad and say oh come on lets just keep going. So we keep heading up the hill then we heard another sssss thats when i said okay I'm getting out of here. Mom didn't want to admit she was scared but after a while i got it out of her. When we got back to the car i thought "hmm i wonder what grandma would have done?" Ha i could just picture you grandma, but i was freaking out too so i guess i have no room to talk. ha ha ha yeah that was my highlight of Devil's Tower.

- Yellowstone. Wow i pretty much am in love with the lake here its more like an ocean. Its absolutely breath taking. There should be a picture on here that i took of it. All the animals are so cool. If you go to Yellowstone your pretty much 100% certain to see buffalo. After a while you kinda get bored, like you get your hopes up when you see all the cars in a turn off and then all it is, is a buffalo. Its like come on i want to see a bear for goodness sakes.

Thank You Come Again.

Pictures to Come - having technical difficulties

Brian: I need to go to the bathroom right now, Crazy Awesome

Mt. Rushmore/Devil's Tower

We headed back to Mt. Rushmore to take some daytime pictures -- and we snapped up a BUNCH.  We chose the top two:

We traveled across South Dakota into Wyoming and arrived at our campsite, at the foot of Devil's Tower.  We saw deer and prairie dogs.  I tried to figure out a way to include a sound clip on this blog to accompany our Devil's Tower pictures, but it doesn't appear that blogger allows for that -- you can hum along as you view the photos : )

Brian: Me see big rock in ground.

Catherine fell asleep again before getting to tell her story about Devil's Tower -- we'll update this post tomorrow with that. 

Mt. Rushmore...at night

We traveled through Minnesota today and saw a bald eagle flying above us - VERY COOL!

We arrived at our Mt. Rushmore campground this evening, setup quickly, ate a fast dinner and headed over to Mt. Rushmore after the nightly lighting ceremony.  Mt. Rushmore is in a word...AWESOME.  It is very impressive, and at night, lit up -- it's so cool.  We'll be heading over there tomorrow morning to catch it during the day.

Nothing from Cath tonight -- she's already asleep!

Brian: I ate 2 hot dogs today.

Note about the picture of the kids -- they were sitting in front of Mt. Rushmore, but the picture was dark where Mt. Rushmore was, so we cropped the presidents out : )

MinneSOta!

We made it all the way to Minnesota today.  Mike drove 670 miles.  We started out at about 7am and arrived at our first campsite by 9:30pm central time.  It was a long haul, but since it was Sunday we didn't have too much traffic to deal with.  There is a LOT of flooding in Wisconsin -- Rt. 30 was shut down around the Wisconsin Dells eastbound and the traffic was backed up for MILES.  Luckily, the westbound side wasn't nearly as bad so they didn't shut us down -- just a couple of exits were closed.  Now it's time for the kids to write a few things:

Brian: I saw a moose, it was a boy moose. I could tell.

Cath: I hate car rides, those seats in the car are murder on my back and neck,  I can't even catch a few Z's. Worst of all Brian and me are not the greatest friends in the world it was tough holding back all the things i wanted to say to him. Like turn you stupid music down before I hurt you and just things of that nature. grr. Other then that, cool trip so far.=]

Axel gets to come!

It's official...we've decided to bring Axel (our German Shepherd) with us on our trip! We may be completely nuts, but we just couldn't bear leaving him home alone for so long with just a few visits per day from our neighbor. So look for pictures of our "baby" hanging out at the Grand Canyon with us!

In case you haven't already met him or seen his picture before, here he is : )

Finalizing trip plans

We've got most of our plans in place -- campground reservations made, Cog Railway reservations (that's to travel up Pike's Peak - YIKES). Now we just need to figure out where we will stay on the first night -- somewhere in Wisconsin we think.

Our first destination is Mt. Rushmore. It made us all excited to go when we watched National Treasure 2 -- since Mt. Rushmore is so prominently featured!

I sure hope gas prices don't get any higher than they are now -- maybe they'll go down by the time we leave (fingers crossed!)