Fleeting visit to Rocky Mountain National Park.

Before I begin this post describing my fun weekend in the mountains, I feel the need to rant. All I wanted was a nice cup of tea before I wrote this and sat down to continue reading my book. I headed down to the shop to buy a few teabags and milk and came back all happy with myself. First issue, no kettle. I had to settle for the microwave to boil my water, and everything about this cup of tea is so lackluster. However, I won't let my disappointment taint the rest of this post, so I'll just sip it in silence and vow never to venture into that domain of tea making for a while.

So I got invited by my mums friend Sue to go along Trail Ridge Road in the Rocky Mountain National Park. It's the highest continuous paved road in the US, but due to the weather and its height it will get closed soon, so Sue offered to take me on a whistle stop tour so I could at least say I'd been on it.
I invited Caragh with me too, so on Friday after class we blagged a lift from my sorority friend Courtney who was driving home for the weekend and headed to Denver. It was so nice having a home cooked meal waiting for us, and some margaritas too! We got up pretty early on Saturday so we'd have enough time to do everything we planned. First we headed to Estes Park which is a cute little mountain town with so many taffy and sweet shops! It kind of reminded me of Gatlinburg, Tennesse in that sense. There was also a market going on in the town centre so we mooched at that, tried some taffy and headed off along the road.

The road actually have some really nice views, so we stopped off at the lookout points, took as many pictures as we could then headed off again. That was quiet good because those windy mountain turns in the car weren't really agreeing with me, so the fresh air was very much welcomed. The wind was absolutely freezing and there's some pretty funny pictures of us looking wonderfully windswept. Once we got to the top Caragh and I took the final walk up to the highest point, were the elevation is 12,005 feet above sea level. Pooh Bear got whipped out too for a token picture, although I had to hold on tight because there was no way he was getting blown away.
Then we headed to a place called Grand Lake, which was our last stop of the day. We didn't get to spend much time there after we ate lunch, but it's definitely a place we want to go back to. The lake had pink sparkly paddle-boats which was a selling point in itself. There's the story of my first trip to the Rocky Mountians, hopefully I'll be back there again before and after the snowfall :)