Blizzards and Estes Park

Jake and I went to Estes Park on Thursday and Friday.  Thursday it decided to snow pretty crazily, including white outs and LOTS of traffic problems.  It took us about 5 hours to get there when it should have been much closer to 1.5 hours.  By the time that we arrived at our hotel, I was just happy to be alive.

We were also really excited to stay in this really cool hotel (Jake has some pictures on his blog of the hotel <click here> , but I posted one of me enjoying the front porch below), but it turns out that the rooms are not anything special.  It felt like a Bed & Breakfast because the walls were so thin and there wasn't much to it.  We woke up around 2am to our neighbors being loud, which was amplified by the fact that the walls were so thin.  However, there was a big screen plasma TV in our room, which was fun, but definitely looked out of place!

We decided to go downtown on Thursday night and walk around, which was ridiculous because no one was open because of the blizzard.  We had the hardest time finding a place to eat!

Friday we got to go to Rocky Mountain National Park, which was absolutely beautiful because of all the snow that came the day before.  We didn't get to go hiking, which is what I was hoping for, but we did get to drive around a bit and check out some amazing views.

We also got to see lots of elk!  We found it funny when a woman asked us if they were moose.  We looked at her license plate, but she was from Colorado.  I don't understand how you can be from Colorado and not know that you are looking at elk.  

Here is some evidence of our car being mad at us for driving in disgusting weather.  Our tires started making lots of noise, so we checked to see if there was ice build-up around them.  The following picture is what fell off after Jake scraped around the tires for a little while (we pulled the car forward to be able to see it all).

We also got a little thirsty, so we ate some snow.

In the end, it seemed like way too short of a trip.  We spent most of our time driving, which was hard for me to get adjusted to since I wanted most of our time to be outside in the park, but we made it.  It also wasn't quite the stress-relieving trip that I was hoping for, but we made do with what we had.  I'm sure glad that Jake was my vacation partner through all of it though because he made it as fun as possible given our circumstances.