This is our first time attempting this particular challenge. With the exception of our trip to Iceland, we don’t have too many pictures taken of roads while driving, but we do have a couple. Looking at all of the photos of highways has us singing “on the road again”. 🙂
Most people understand having the travel bug, but there are some people that we know that just don’t seem to get it. Obviously, we currently live in Colorado and spend quite a bit of time hiking in the mountains and enjoying our beautiful state. But, when the two of us first met, we lived in a resort town on the ocean in Maryland. In fact, our first condominium that we lived in together was right on the water and we spent many evenings watching the sun set over the bay. The first year of our marriage was basically a working vacation filled with water skiing, strolls on the beach, and plenty of sun.
Twenty-seven years have gone by since we first met, but we still look back at those days when life was carefree and it instilled a desire to see the world. Maybe it was because we spent so many days staring out at the ocean and wondering what was on the other side of the horizon. Since those sunny days, work has moved us several times until we landed here in Colorado and now our sunsets occur behind the peaks of the rocky mountains, but the want to see the world is just as strong.
An argument could be that having had the opportunity to live by the ocean and then the mountains should have cured us of the travel bug, but it has only made it stronger. No life is a series of sunsets and romantic places and our opportunities to travel aren’t as often as we’d like, but we try to make the most out of the time that we do have. Maybe this doesn’t completely explain why both of us have had the travel bug as long as we’ve known each other, but maybe it explains it a little.
After a couple of weeks with snowy weather in Colorado, we finally had a gorgeous weekend with warm temperatures. We decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and go hiking in Castlewood Canyon State Park. Our thought was that hiking in the canyon would be better than trying to get up into the mountains, which are still covered in snow. Unfortunately, it seemed that just about every other person had the same thought as we did and the park was absolutely packed with families, small children, and dogs. When we go hiking, we usually prefer to go someplace where we can get away from people and truly get ourselves lost in nature, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen on this hike.
Disappointed, but still wanting to get a hike in, we jumped onto the trail along with a lot of other people. As we continued hiking along the trail, we did get some separation from other people, so we were starting to enjoy the hike a little more. After hiking for about thirty minutes, we came to a section of the trail that was under water due to run-off from the snow melting. It was a bottleneck of people trying to hop across rocks with small children and dogs, which wasn’t particularly smart by some of them considering how strong the current was.
We stood on the bank of the stream, waiting for fifteen minutes as a family tried to cross the rushing water. After having one dog and their youngest daughter fall into the water, they finally turned back. We were tired of waiting, frustrated with the crowds and the muddy conditions, so we turned around and headed back to the car. It certainly wasn’t the hike that we were hoping for and was pretty disappointing.
It was just a reminder to ourselves that hiking in early spring in Colorado, the conditions can always be tough. Melting snow often causes the streams to overrun their banks and places where the trails cross them can become impassable. We’ll go back to the canyon and hike again sometime, but not on the weekend. We’ve hiked the canyon in the past when the kids were young and it is a beautiful park, but we’d prefer to enjoy it when it isn’t quite as crowded.