“Travel makes you speechless, then it turns you into a storyteller.” - 14th century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta
When I travel to a place that I fall in love with, I like to pass my experience on to others with the hope they might be inspired to visit that place. So when I read the quote above in a Smithsonian Magazine article, I thought it was a perfect description of most of my travels.
We spent our morning hiking in Great Sand Dunes National Park.
We passed this interesting sign...
...lots of sand...
...and snow topped mountains.
It was a beautiful fall morning for a short hike from the Montville Trailhead.
I was left behind right from the start of the hike. That was fine with me. I had plenty of time to take pictures.
I found Kennedy somewhere along the trail.
The view across the park from a clearing along the Montville trail.
We left the park and headed toward Denver.
We stopped in Pueblo for lunch and stumbled across the Historic Arkansas River Walk.
We enjoyed the River Walk much better than our lunch at Angelo's Pizza.
A fish bike rack...I loved this.
After two weeks of hiking mostly in the wilderness, we stopped at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs to break up our drive to Denver.
It was extremely crowded on a picture perfect afternoon. We parked in the main lot outside the park and spent the next three hours hiking across the whole park. There are a lot of rock formations throughout the park. I'm pretty sure we saw all of them.
Charles Elliott Perkins is memorialized by his children as the man that protected this area and kept it free for the public to enjoy it.
We hiked along the Gateway Trail, the Central Garden Trail, the Palmer Trail, the Scotsman Trail, the Buckskin Charlie Trail, the Niobrara Trail and the Ute Trail. All these pictures were taken somewhere along those trails.
Once we were hiking on the dirt trails, we rarely ran into anyone else.
This section of the Niobrara and Ute trails allow mountain bikes. I would love to ride here.
We had grasslands and prairies on one side...
...and mountains on the other side.
There were also rock formations everywhere.
Hiking along the Ute Trail down into a colorful valley.
This might be part of the Rock Ledge Ranch historic site. We got lost trying to find the parking lot. The first lot we saw wasn't our parking lot. So we continued onward...
...and found this interesting sign.
Eventually we walked across some grassland and had to climb through this barbed wire fence to get to our car. It was a fun way to end our trip to Colorado.
We had a late night dinner at this diner. Then we flew home very early the next morning.
