We slept well at our overnight Harvest Host spot in Colorado Springs. This is the fifth time we've used that new membership, and it is helping us make a quick trip as we're heading north through Colorado. We saw Pike's Peak and its surrounding peaks as we headed out of Colorado Springs this morning.
We are driving 110 miles today, mostly on I-25. We saw lots of construction, and miles of narrow two-lane highways with cement barriers on both sides. This is not the kind of scenery that motor home drivers (or their nervous passengers) want to see. We'll call this a little travel hiccup.
Then it was on through Denver, with six lanes of traffic going our way. This is not the kind of scenery that motor home drivers (or their nervous passengers) want to see either. We planned this trip through the city at a non-rush hour, because we've heard that Denver can be a tough city to drive through. Is that another hiccup?
So we were glad when we arrived at Boulder County Fairgrounds in Longmont, Colorado. This is a first-come-first-served campground, and it's always a little worrisome if a camp site will be open. We are finding that people that bought a record number of new RVs last year, are filling up campgrounds at a record pace this summer. That has been another travel hiccup for us this summer. This time we were lucky to find plenty of spaces that would work for us, and picked a nice shady spot for the next three nights.
Denisa is still catching up with Alaska blogs, so she has been using the computer more than usual. Yesterday, it refused to charge the computer battery. So today Mark took the computer apart, trying to find out why. This might be another travelers' hiccup when the electronics doesn't work like they should.
We don't know much about Longmont, Colorado, but we've heard lots about the nearby town of Boulder. So we headed that direction to get advice on the highlights that we shouldn't miss during our stay. The Visitor Information Office is on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder.
This brick-paved pedestrian street is filled with restaurants and trendy shops and beautiful flowers. We ate before we came and we don't have room in the motor home for anything new, so we just enjoyed the downtown flowers for now.
The first recommendation we got at the visitor center was to check out the Boulder Creek Trail, so we headed that way.
This creek winds its way through the city of Boulder. We wondered if it would be a good kayaking route. But from the look of all this white water we won't need the boat today.
The trail along the water is a well-used walking trail, and we noticed plenty of bikers using it too. So we took our bikes off the pickup and headed through town.
The University of Colorado takes up a prominent part of town. Knowing that we like exploring college campuses, we biked to campus. We checked out the football stadium, with its view of the Flatiron Mountains from the home stands.
At the Champions Plaza on campus, Mark posed with the statue of the University of Colorado mascot and her handlers. A live buffalo escorts the football team onto the field at home games. We think it is interesting that the UC sports teams are known as the Buffs, but we have learned from our many trips into national parks and wildlife refuges that this is not a Buffalo--but a bison.
Since it's summer and many college campuses are still using virtual classes, we didn't see many students. It was almost like biking through the woods.
We didn't take any pictures, but we saw lots of tents and makeshift homeless villages in the less visible parts of Boulder. We also saw a confrontation in the park when the police were trying to do their job. Not all travel views are pretty as a picture. Just another hiccup for today.
We found out that the bike trail continues out of town and continues steeply into the surrounding mountains. We probably would have gone further this direction but 1) Denisa is a sissy about those uphill mountain biking trails, and 2) we had already biked her 8-mile limit today.
Coming back to the park, we watched very experienced helmeted kayakers flipping over and paddling against the white water in Boulder Creek. It was another demonstration that we don't need to be kayaking here.
Since this was an urban day, we didn't have many opportunities for wildlife pictures. But we snapped this happy squirrel, finishing off a piece of watermelon along the trail.
Since we are planning a longer road trip tomorrow, we decided to fill the pickup with gasoline. We have noticed the increasing price of gasoline and diesel this summer. It looks like 2021 will be our most expensive fuel year, with record-breaking prices among our six years of travel. That could be another travel hiccup.
We had heard on the news that Denver is having gasoline shortages, with long lines and waits if drivers found a gas station with fuel. We found some of that in Longmont as well. This is our third state--Texas, Kansas, and now Colorado--to find gas stations closed because of gasoline shortages. Did we hear a hiccup?
When you travel like we do, you sometimes experience days when you get stuck in road construction, you have to drive through large cities, and you experience hiccups like crowded campgrounds, expensive fuel, and gasoline shortages. Today just had a few more hiccups when we had computer problems, and we witnessed a community disrespecting its law enforcement officers. We like to be truthful that not all days are perfect. But we still think wandering is a great adventure in spite of the hiccups.
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