Red rum! Red rum!

Fans of The Shining ought to enjoy a picture or two from this part of the trip.  The Stanley Hotel is in Estes Park so we stopped in for a quick visit.

Babbling Brook

Have you ever listened to those audio clips of a babbling brook for relaxation?  Well, I figure they must record that at a place like this.

Holy Elk, Batman!

Elk.  On side of road.  Huge.

When is a 6.5 mile hike fun and not torture?

If you're like me (lazy), usually you'd answer "never".  Well, let me tell you.  It's worth the nearly 7 mile round trip when one is hiking Deer Mountain Trail.  So, so cool.  It was pretty rough. We took frequent stops and it did take us about 1 and 3/4 hours to get to the summit.  We stayed up there about 45 minutes and then it took us about an hour and half back to car.  Summit was truly breath-taking with views for miles around.  A must see if you ever make it to this park.  Bring water and snacks.  We saw some people way under-prepared and I'm certain they didn't make it all the way up which sucks for them.

Flatirons - incredible hike and views

On Friday we were up early for two reasons.  First, we were staying a relatively nasty motel and wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.  If you do "Priceline's Name Your Own Price" you might want to be quite careful in your criteria.  The room wasn't particularly cheap - costing us over $125 for the night, but the place was highly questionable.  We survived...and yes we've turned into big babies as we've gotten older. Secondly, we wanted to get out and hike the Flatirons near Boulder before heading to Estes Park.  Mission accomplished; it was truly outstanding. The views there are just unlike anything I've seen and one can hike near to the summit (although you really need to CLIMB once you get to a certain point so we had to stop...but got very close to top).

Flatirons and Boulder itself is a place we will want to return to.  We could have probably stayed there for several days and had an enjoyable vacation.  Excellent time.  Oh...and we had a salad for lunch (after partaking in some Asian food the day before) as we are finally cutting back on the ridiculous caloric intake rate we were on the first several days of trip.

After leaving Boulder, we cruised up to Estes Park and checked into the Wildwood Inn. Super nice suite here with mountain views, private hot tub, tempur-pedic bed, kitchen, etc.  Couldn't be more different than accommodations in Boulder.  Staying here until Monday, so it's great to have a nice "home" less than a mile from the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park.  Ventured into park late afternoon on Friday and it's pretty darn impressive.  A ton of pictures to come.    It's so much cooler here.  Right now it's about 60 degrees and a bit overcast.  Hopefully we'll avoid rain at least in the AM, so we can get in a good hike.

Decided to leave the big city behind and head towards Boulder early today.  Denver is a very cool city and I'm sure we could do many more great things if we stayed longer, but we were longing for the mountains and decided to head out.  We did make two stops on our way up to Boulder.  First, we went to Red Rocks - they have an amphitheater and some amazing views.  Tons of huge stars have played this location, but when we were there it simply was a tourist area.  The non-tourists, by and large, were there to use the steps for exercise. You'll see runners in some of the pictures.   This place is incredible.  Check out the pictures.

We then headed towards our hotel in Boulder, but along the way we ended up passing right through Golden. Frankly, when I saw the sign I said something like "I think there's a brewery in Golden...as I think there's   marketing for some sort of beer being made in Golden, Colorado". As you probably realize, it's Coors. So,we figured given that we literally were driving right through the home town that we'd have to take the tour. All I can say about it is that the people at Coors need to visit Busch in St. Louis to learn how it's done. We waited in line for more than an hour and half, some of which in 90 degree sun, to then load on a bus which took us on a rather lame city tour.  Then, we finally got to go on a self-guided walking tour.  The tour itself was fine and they did offer 3 nice size tastings at the end.  But unless you really like Coors products, the tasting leaves you wanting tastier products.  We did get Blue Moon (which I do heartily enjoy), along with something called Batch10 and Coors Banquet.  Also tried something so good that we cannot remember it's name.  Overall this event took us around 3 hours and it wasn't too great.  If we had gone out of our way to get to this tour, we'd have been super frustrated.  They have no idea how to move a volume of people in the summer through their facilities and they just said it was super busy in summer.  No duh.  AB seems to have no issue pushing through 10X volume and we didn't wait more than 15 minutes for that tour.  Nonetheless, it was free.

We arrived in Boulder around 3.  What a really nice town.  Went to the heart of the place - Pearl Street and got some food at Wok Eat.  Checked our a bunch of specialty stores and just took in the scenery.  Ended up then also going to the 29th Street Mall to do some browsing.  Tomorrow begins the mostly outdoor portion of our trip, so this was one last foray into major civilization.  Boulder seems like a great town.

KC to Denver is a long drive

Driving across Kansas is quite far and quite boring.  I guess many of you already know this, but if you don't, I'm telling you now.  It's 400+ odd miles of mostly flat farmlands with nothing to see or do.  It took us much of the day yesterday just traversing this vast wasteland.  At least the speed limit is 75.  Cruised across state and got to our hotel in Aurora just in time to catch overtime of the really boring match between Argentina and Netherlands.  Why didn't Netherlands try to score?  What a disappointing strategy.  Go for the win, rather than sit back and defend.  If the US had half the players they had, with our attitude, we'd win the entire World Cup.

After a super long car ride, we were pretty darn hungry, having only eaten snacks all day in car.  Decided to go to (yet another) Man v. Food favorite, this time it was Beau Jo's pizza, home of the Colorado style pizza. it's kind of like Chicago deep-dish, but sans dish.  Just a really super thick pizza filled with toppings galore. Their menu was awesome.  We got a two pound half-n-half pie, my half was filled with every meat possible and Susan's was filled with veggies.  Guess which was better?  We had to compare this to Mellow Mushroom, but they are so different, it's hard to compare.  I guess it just comes down to what style pizza one prefers.  Anyway it was good.  Yet another great meal on this journey.

Decided to do some walking in downtown Denver and went to State Capitol.  Really nice there.

KC, a brief stay

Following the splendor that was St. Louis, we arrived in KC prepared to be underwhelmed and frankly, we were.  If there's a heart or theme to this city, we didn't find it in our brief stay. Best we can tell KC is a bunch of disparate areas with no unifying center.  St. Louis had the Arch and Busch Stadium and a bunch of hotels/eateries near the river.  KC just doesn't feel the same at all.  Not necessarily bad, just different and in this guy's opinion just a bit less interesting.

Our first stop in KC was to the Power and Light District.  I must say it was super cool...KC Live, similar to the area in Louisville of similar name.  We arrived at what we thought was the start of the Germany-Brazil game, only to walk in on a throng of Brazil fans that were pouting.  We looking up and saw it was already 3-nil...and very quickly it was 5-nil.  Crazy.  We did hang out at McFadden's, a cool sports bar, and had a beer while we watched the complete humiliation of the Brazil team.  By the time the game has ended, we were super famished and figured it was time for some KC ribs. {BTW - heard that for USA games this entire region in picture below was totally packed with people which was easy to imagine when we saw how great an area it was for watching any sort of event...giant screens, tons of bars, plenty of places to sit, etc).

On the advice of the bartender at McFadden's we headed to Oklahoma Joe's and grabbed some ribs and dirty rice.  Mmm....quite good.  Rated as one of the best in KC, they didn't disappoint. The ambiance of the place didn't match Pappy's (this place was literally in a gas station) , but the food was on par.  Saying a lot giving how good Pappy's turned out to be.  If I would have gotten the same dish, I could have done the head to head comparison, but had to go ribs this time.  Susan and I split a rack.  They didn't have the fried corn, though, so on that count, Pappy's wins.  All in all if you're in KC and want some great food, OJ's is on point.

To wrap up our tour of KC, we decided to go check out some fountains (I guess KC is famous for them) and did this in the Country Club Plaza a definitely upscale dining and shopping region of the city.  This was totally different than the first two stops in our KC tour and there was historic architecture, fountains, parks, a tons of high end shopping places and a bunch of restaurants (like PF Chang's, Cheesecake Factory, Morton's and then some more exclusive sorts of places).   Kind of cool and if our stay here was longer, we probably would have spent more time in this district.

A wrap for KC.  Kind of dull, but ok.  Long drive tomorrow to Denver, but we've almost reached our ultimate goal of the drive!

Pirates strand 47, give game to Cards

Ok.  So maybe it was only like 12 runners left on base, but man, that was painful.  A game which started with lightning and an hour rain delay ended with fireworks.  Adams blasted a 2 run shot in the bottom of the ninth to crush the Pirates hopes.

Cardinals 2, Pirates 0 in a game the Bucs totally dominated.  If at the end of the year, the Pirates are a game out behind St. Louis, this will be THE GAME they should have won.

Busch stadium is really nice.  Sound system is amazing (VT could learn something about how to fill a stadium with sound from these guys). View of the arch from one's seats is quite cool.  It was a fun time, just would have been more fun if the good guys hit the 9th inning homer, rather than a walk-off going the other way.

Brewery fun

After so many distillery tours, had to check out at least one brewery and given our locale, it had to be Anheuser-busch.  Free tour and tasting. Plus, if you are there at 3pm, they give you a third 4 ounce Bud in addition to the 4 oz Bud earlier and the full pint of our choice (we both had Shock Top) that just comes standard.  Tour was just ok.  We did learn that they use rice and "beechwood" in Bud, which makes it different that most similar lagers. Not my favorite, but it was free.

Susan was really happy to go here too...for the free tour and beer, but more so to see the Clydesdale horses. We saw a couple on the tour and at 3:30pm, they brought one around for pictures.