Nikki Post: Epic Road Trip Prologue

As Claire mentioned in a previous blog post, we teamed up with my friends Lisa and Lauren to visit three and a half states (Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and a drive-through of New Mexico) in two and a half days (part of Friday, and all of Saturday and Sunday). Lisa has a policy of visiting at least one new state before every birthday, and this year, Oklahoma was the lucky recipient of our presence. Our stops in the other states were merely to make the weekend epic and exciting. We had a blast and solidified our statuses as "besties", which was especially exciting for me because it marks the first time that I can say I have best friends in both of my "homes."

I'm finally editing the photos, and Claire's helping me do research on the various sites we visited and people we met. (Because she likes this to be an educational as well as entertaining blog.) As always, I thank you, loyal readers, for your patience as I sort through and edit the hundreds of photos I took and dig through the internet for information to share. Claire's first entry will detail our trip through a stormy Kansas, our stay in a swanky hotel, fun at the Tulip Festival in Wamego, and our delicious lunch at a taquería named after a very famous terrier.

Not sure how many entries there will be, as I haven't yet split everything up into sub-folders. There WILL be additional photos from the trip added to my Facebook fan page, which may get updated before this blog occasionally, simply because it's easier. Keep an eye out there as well. :)

Nikki Post: I'm SO SORRY (and not dead)

Hi all,

I'm so sorry for not posting in a super-long time. My life has been consumed by many other things. I'm in a play (my first in Denver AND my first for which I'm getting PAID!), so there were rehearsals and a tumultuous tech week, and I was in every single opening weekend show. (We have alternate actors who switch off for different performances. I'm only going to be a minor character in the pre-show this upcoming weekend.) I've been volunteering and having some work stress and some life stress. All of this means that I haven't traveled anywhere, with Claire or otherwise. I have a few hundred pictures from when my mom, aunt, and grandma came into town at the end of September I need to edit and post. Having that many photos to go through is a daunting task, and having not gone with them on their adventures means I don't know a lot about what they did or what they saw. Luckily, my grandma has been really good about posting her pictures to Facebook, often with captions explaining what everything is, so I should be able to get some information from there. I just haven't had the time to sit down and force myself to do it.

Posting at least the photos from their trip to Garden of the Gods is one of my goals for this week.

Please know that I haven't lost interest in this blog at all and that I'll be bringing my laptop with me when I'm home for Christmas so that when insomnia strikes, I can upload pictures and stories of our adventures back in Baltimore. I'm really looking forward to going home this year, as I've been homesick for my nieces and nephews, and because I get to have a party with my bridesmaids AND look for potential wedding locations for next year! Lots to do, and hopefully I'll get to make some time to keep you all up-to-date about our holiday adventures. :)

Thanks for reading,
Nikki

Autumn in the Rockies

WOW! WHAT A CRAZY WEEK I'VE HAD!! Nikki's mom Diane, grandma Shirley, and aunt Charlene all got into town on September 22nd and left October 1st. Nikki spent the weekends with them, as she couldn't get off work (except Monday to drive them to the airport), but she left me with them to go adventuring. We went to more places in Colorado in one week than Nikki and Steve have visited in one year! [Nikki Note: To be fair, my family members didn't have to go to work and plan their adventuring around 8-hour work days and long (for Steve, anyway) commutes. Although I really AM jealous of them.] Combined, the ladies took over 700 photos (mostly of me) during the week. Nikki says that she'll have enough blog material to last at least two months, if she spaces everything out right. If she starts getting lazy and not posting on time, don't worry; I'll whip her back into shape. ;)

The first Sunday we were all together, Nikki took the ladies up to Rocky Mountain National Park to drive along Trail Ridge Road and see the aspens changing color. This is one of the things Colorado residents love best about autumn. Frankly, I think the colors Baltimore trees turn are more spectacular, but the way the bright yellow aspen leaves were scattered among the green pine trees WAS really pretty.

To get up to RMNP, we drove through Lyons, which is just a few miles outside of Estes Park. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Mom, Grandma, and Aunt Charlene go geocaching, which is a treasure hunt using GPS coordinates and clues. People all over the world hide these caches, which can be as tiny as a tube of chapstick or as big as a 2-gallon bucket, and other people find them. When you find a cache, you have to write your name in it on the "log," and if you want to take/leave a little toy (if there's room), you can. They also have these things called "travel bugs," which are little tokens people take from place to place and "check-in" online so the original owner can see where it's been. Kinda reminds me of me! Mom and Aunt Charlene said that there was a cache hidden near this little park, so we pulled over to investigate.

There were a bunch of these engraved pictures on the ground in the middle of the park, commemorating Lyons' history.

This awesome water fountain was also in the middle of the park. The artist who made the weird egg-thing in the middle has a business in town.

A TIME CAPSULE!! 

How cool is this?! Nikki would be 108 years old by the time the capsule would get opened. She asked what I would put in a time capsule to show the future what life was like in 2012. At the time, I said I'd probably put in a DVD of season one of Jersey Shore, with a note apologizing for that show ever being on the air, but now I'm thinking I wanna put that weird corncob armadillo in the capsule. No explanation. Just this weird little figurine of an armadillo dressed as a corncob.

Aunt Charlene and Mom (a.k.a. "the girls") were using Mom's new GPS/geocaching smartphone app to try and figure out where the local cache was. Grandma, Nikki, and I were kinda bored of waiting, so we took some more pictures (hers will be coming later) and hung out by the fountain.

Grandma used to go square dancing all the time when she was younger. She told me that she even had special outfits and dresses she would wear!

Finally, the girls found the right coordinates and set off to find the hidden treasure. Grandma went back to the car because her ankle was bothering her, but Nikki and I followed Mom and Aunt Charlene, eager to see where their search would take them. Turns out, the cache was hidden on an electrical transformer near some dumpsters. Not that glamorous. :p Mom found it, but Nikki said that she'd suggested it was on the transformer. (She's terrible at geocaching.)

Mom and I celebrating her find. I'm holding the cache. (Doesn't she look JUST like Nikki in this photo?!)

The log inside the "micro" cache.

All "professional" geocachers have "handles" (user names) that they use on the website and in the logs. Aunt Charlene is "Caviar" because her husband raises fish and caviar. Grandma is Creampuff. (Her boyfriend Bill is "Sweet Man.") Mom is "Lil Creampuff." Nikki is "Baby Creampuff." And I just got to be Claire. Little do the geocachers of the internet know that this mysterious "Claire" is actually an armadillo travel correspondent!

Next we drove up to Estes Park, which is a town right on the edge of RMNP. Nikki's car Becky had some trouble getting up the big hill leading towards the town (it's a hybrid, which means it has a small engine), but it was smooth sailing down. If you haven't been to Estes, you should totally go! The landmark sign outside of town has one of the most gorgeous views of the valley below. Naturally, we pulled over for a photo shoot.

Mom and I get all meta and take a picture of Nikki taking a picture of us.

Three generations and an armadillo (Note Nikki's stupid hair/sunglasses. She really should stay on the *other* side of the camera!!)

We had our first taste of Colorado wildlife while taking tourist shots: wild turkeys!! They were just wandering all over the place, being ugly and eating food. I've never seen a wild turkey before (just the ones on a Thanksgiving dinner table!), so this was pretty cool.

gobble gobble

We also saw the prettiest bluebird I've ever seen in my life: a Stellar's Jay. (Thanks to FlickrHiveMind for helping with the ID!)

Some of the tourists were getting a little too close to the wildlife, feeding them peanuts and trying to get them to eat out of their hands. I wanted to scold them and let them know that feeding wildlife is NOT a good idea, because you could accidentally poison the animal or make it too used to humans or get rabies or something, but Nikki told me to stay out of it. I told her that it's all cute and photo-worthy until someone gets a finger bitten off.

Of course that didn't stop me from taking a picture.

We drove down the hill to Lake Estes, which is a gorgeous, HUGE lake near town. We were just going to show the family how pretty the lake was, but as we were driving to the parking lot, we saw a giant elk, just chillin' under a tree! Obviously, we stopped to take pictures, and then MORE people stopped to take pictures. It was super cool. Everyone was stoked to be so close to an elk.

We skipped visiting town to go straight to the park. Grandma got us a senior discount (which is good for life!), so we only had to pay $10 for a weekly pass instead of the usual $20. The park ranger who helped us was suuuuuuuuuper dreamy, as are most of the park rangers I've met here in Colorado. (Like most female armadillos, I love a man in uniform.) We first stopped off at a meadow area because there was a virtual cache that the girls wanted to check out. (National and State Parks are off-limits for physical caches, so virtual ones make you answer questions about the site and/or take a picture proving you were there.) Grandma and I stayed behind and took pictures. (Prettier ones are on Nikki's Facebook fan page. See link at the end of this entry to check them out!)

This is only a sliver of the beauty the Rockies had to offer us that day!

As we continued to drive around, we saw other signs that told about the animals that live in the park. Nikki was especially interested in the Bighorn Sheep, because it's the only "Colorado" animal she hasn't seen yet. She's seen a moose and a black bear and elk and pronghorn, but no sheep. (Spoiler alert: She still hasn't seen one.)

I'm always interested in seeing how big my paws are compared to the paws/feet of other animals.

My favorite stop of the day was at the Alpine Tundra, waaaaaay up towards the top of the mountains (starting at about 11,000 feet above sea level!). It's the highest you can go in ANY national park in the US. The tundra is cool because it's so high up that trees can't grow there anymore, just these tiny little flowers and lichen, which is a kind of moss. There are still some animals that live up in the tundra, but not many because it's COLD and WINDY!! We didn't have heavy coats with us or hats (well, Mom did), so the hoodies had to do. It was so pretty up there though that I didn't mind. Plus, Nikki's a really good heat source. ;)

You can see in this picture that the tundra is a pretty bleak-looking place. A lot of rocks and small plants and not much else. If you clicked on the link about the tundra, you would've read that plants STILL manage to grow up here, but it can take 100 years for them to grow back if they're stepped on. Nikki gently told a nice lady not to walk on the tundra and told her why, and the woman was SO EMBARRASSED!! Her husband even walked away from her like he didn't know her. I felt bad for her, and Nikki did too, but the woman said she was really grateful that Nikki said something before she destroyed too many of the plants. The lady also said that she'd let other people know too so everyone can enjoy this awesome place for years to come.

Protect the tundra!

Info about the tundra and how it's formed

Full disclosure: I am an animal, and I love when people feed me. However, I'm not a WILD animal, so it's ok when people feed me. When you feed a wild animal (like the little girl towards the beginning of this post), you make it too used to humans. Then it always gets really close to humans and lets its guard down, and what if there was a human who wanted to kill or hurt it?! It wouldn't suspect that! Plus, when wild animals get too used to getting food from humans, they stop hunting themselves, and that OBVIOUSLY causes problems. Plus, maybe the food you're giving them isn't good for them. Like, what if that chipmunk has a peanut allergy?! (Probably doesn't, but you get my point.) So, the moral of the story is - don't be a jerk. Let the animals be animals and feed your armadillo friends instead.

The marmot: one of the animals that braves the tundra's cold and lives there anyway. We didn't see one. :(

Glaciers are really awesome. They're these (usually) huge things of ice and snow that never melt and move veeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyy sloooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwllllllllllyyyyyyyy, carving out valleys and canyons. You should totally check out the site I linked to if you don't know much about glaciers.

I don't see too many glaciers out there, but the ones that ARE there are moving. very. slowly.

Just below the tundra is the subalpine forest. This is the last place trees can grow before they get to the too-harsh climate of the tundra. A lot more animals live there too, and even though it's still pretty high up above sea level (9,000 - 11,000 feet), it's a lot easier to hike there too!

The weather in Denver can be really unpredictable. The morning could be really cold, but by the time afternoon rolls around, you're sweating because temperatures are in the 90s! And it'll rain, but only in a few places, so you could drive three blocks and have rain-not rain-drizzle. So imagine how crazy it must be up in the mountains, where weather is pretty much MADE!

I can totally see why they call it "Cloud Factory," can't you?

Ok, enough learning! It's time for tourist pictures!!

Here I am enjoying the gorgeous views from the tundra. Just off-camera, Mom is at the ready to grab me in case the wind tries to blow me off the mountain!

Mom must've had Nikki take, like, ten pictures of the two of us with different views of the mountains behind us. I chose the three I liked best.

She was holding onto me tight! Dang wind.

Ok, this is totally my paws-down FAVORITE picture of me and mom. Look at that view!

Our last stop of the day was at the Alpine Visitors Center, where you can buy cool souvenirs to prove you were at the Rocky Mountains (tee-shirts, key chains, stuff like that) and awesome jewelry and Native American art and other stuff. Nikki bought her dad some jams and bought herself a bumper sticker, and Mom bought a picture frame. Grandma bought a magnet. (She collects them from every state she's been to. I think she's been to all of them!) I don't know if Aunt Charlene got anything.

They had a book section, and when I saw this, I BEGGGGED Nikki to buy it for me, but she doesn't like talking about poop, so she said no. >:P I made her take a picture of it for me though, so I could share it with all of you and make you laugh.

How great is this?!?! I mean, the idea that you can say, "Oh, yeah, this is a bear" just by looking at its poop and what's in it is SUCH a cool idea to me!

Nikki found a book that SHE liked, but I told her that she had enough books that she hasn't read yet, so she'll just have to save this one for another time. Plus, I don't think its subject matter is very appropriate.

GREAT title though!

So that's our family trip to the Rocky Mountains. The ladies and I went back later in the week without Nikki, but she hasn't been able to sort through all of those photos yet. In the meantime, check out the pictures of this visit that Nikki posted on her Facebook fan page so you can get a better idea how pretty the mountains are when the aspens are changing colors.

Camping in the Cold

During the second weekend of September, Nikki, Steve, Eva, and I all piled into Steve's over-packed car and drove two-and-a-half hours south of Denver to Spruce Grove Campground, which is at a higher altitude than Denver, as it's in the Rocky Mountains, near Pike's Peak. It was a tiring but pretty drive, with some of the aspen leaves already transitioning into their autumn yellow, but it would've been A MILLION times better if Eva hadn't whined and whimpered THE ENTIRE WAY DOWN. Seriously. I thought Nikki was gonna leap into the back of the car and strangle the dog!! I don't know when Eva developed a dislike of riding in cars, but she was quiet for only maybe fifteen minutes the whole time.

A rare quiet moment. Note the crazy eyes.

When we finally arrived to the campsite, we discovered that, while it was idyllic, it was also a walk-in site, which meant we had to park the car and carry all our stuff over a bridge to the site.

View from a little hiding spot behind the campsite
that Nikki had to go to because she was having an anxiety attack
and needed quiet.

After the tiring trip, we decided that before setting up the tent, we were gonna chill on the nearby riverbed with Mandy and Camden and Mandy's friends Allison and Andrew. Allison brought her dogs Gonzo and Trixie, so there were several pups all running around and vying for our attention.

Relaxin'...like I do.

Trixie is the black dog, and Gonzo is the little one.

The gang. Andrew is in the chair in the background,
and Allison is in the blue jacket.

Eva, acting crazy as usual

A little later, Nikki and I decided to hike up the mountain (for lack of a better term) and climb on top of this giant rock formation right next to our campsite. The climb was steep, but Nikki said that the climb to Hanging Lake (check out her pictures starting with this one) was waaaaaaay worse and longer. Now, I'm not really scared of heights, but standing on top of a giant rock that towered above the whole valley was kinda making me nervous. As such, I made Nikki not take any pictures of me; I didn't want my fans to see me freaking out. :p

View to the right of where we stood on the giant rock.
We couldn't find a way to get to the lake from the campground.

View from the backish part of where we stood.
The space inside the red box is our campsite!

View to the left of where we stood. This is the rest of the campground.
I think Pike's Peak is one of those mountains, but I don't know.

For a while, Nikki laid down on the rock and just looked at the sky and listened to the Christian youth group down below perform slam poetry about Jesus and finding their future wives. (I'm not joking. We couldn't hear all of it, but it was hilariously awesome and very earnest.) Nikki wanted to take some "selfies" (formerly called "MySpace photos," but that site barely exists anymore, so someone made up this new name, which is a shortened version of "self-portraits"), but it's REALLY hard to do with a fancy camera like her Nikon D3000. These are the best out of the ten or so she took:

Steve's favorite. He thought it was hilarious.

Nikki's favorite. At least you can see the mountains in the background.

Obviously, Nikki's arms are too short to do a selfie properly, and she won't let me touch her camera, since I have the tendency to break her things by accident. :p

Eventually we climbed down and joined everyone else. Cam and Steve had gone snake-hunting in the river, and Camden actually found a snake!! Nikki didn't get a picture of it, unfortunately, but Andrew did. If he ever sends the pictures to Mandy, I'll add them here. It was a garter snake and kinda big too. The other kids playing in the water were SUPER excited, and Cam was proud to show Steve that he had found a snake.

On the hunt with his trusty net

The rest of the night went pretty typically. We set up a campfire, cooked hamburgers (except for Andrew, who keeps kosher, so he brought some "boil in a bag" Indian food), and Nikki read a zombie story that she had started during the last camping trip. Camden LOVES ghost stories but gets scared easily since, you know, he's 6 years old. Mandy likes listening to Nikki tell the stories because Nikki does voices for every character. We stayed up chatting then went to bed.

Like the first time we went camping with Eva at West Chicago Creek,she and Steve took up most of the room on the air mattress. Only this time, THEY STOLE ALL THE COVERS TOO!! We had our usual set-up of two flannel sleeping bags, the comforter, and two extra blankets, and Nikki and I got a sliver of one of the sleeping bags and that's it. I woke up at one point and noticed that Eva was actually under the blanket Nikki had been using!!

Somehow, we survived the night and spent the morning packing up the campsite. (Well, Nikki and Steve cleaned up the campsite. I don't do manual labor.) Eva was shivering, as it was still about 40* outside, so Nikki tied her hoodie around Eva, as no one could find Eva's dog sweater before we left to go camping. Eva would've appreciated it, I'm sure, were she not super uncomfortable in it. Camden, however, kept Eva calm by petting her and talking quietly to her.

The Dog Whisperer

Nikki offered to drive home, since Steve had driven all the way down. Eva still whined, but much less than she had on the way to the campsite. We stopped at a Safeway in a small town to pick up some breakfast food. Nikki got a burrito for herself and a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich for Eva. After having such a heavy meal, Eva DEFINITELY calmed down.

While we were driving back, Nikki pulled over to take a picture of a sign she had seen the day before. It was a "point of interest," as the sign said, but the part that stood out to Nikki was a bunch of white rocks that spelled out a giant "YOLO." YOLO stands for "You Only Live Once," and according to Nikki, it's only used by "idiots on the internet and teenagers." [Nikki Note: The link takes you to UrbanDictionary.com, which is a great resource for finding out the meaning of slang words, but is user-generated, so it contains adult language.]

Dang kids. Pretty good prank though, if you ask me.

This is the real reason why this location is a point of interest: it's a historical site that used to house Native Americans of the Ute tribe. Of course, it's kinda lame to look out at a place with fields and a pile of used tires and a small gold mine and think "Native Americans used to live here until settlers moved in and kicked them out." I'm not gonna get into it, but I'll just say that I think the Utes got a raw deal.

It's hard to read the text on the board, so I recommend
going to the website I linked above.

This point of interest was located just outside of Florissant, Colorado, which is a small town that's claim to fame is the Fossil Beds National Park, where people found a TON of fossils in this lake bed. (We didn't get to stop here.)

(More info on the Ute Indians too)

The other big deal about Florissant is that they're a part of the Gold Belt Byway, which we *also* didn't get to see. [Nikki Note: We had a psycho dog in the car. I wanted to get home as quickly as possible.]

 

 

You can *almost* see the little gold mine that was there to the back right
of where I'm sitting.

So that was our trip. Not super exciting, but at least it was really pretty and we got to go camping before it REALLY gets cold out! Nikki has also sworn that Eva will NEVER go camping with us EVER again, as it's too stressful for everyone involved. Maybe next time we go camping, then, I'll actually get some blankets!