Our family picture for the day.
This day was our "big" day.
The day we are gone all day and we spend some money.
We hit the road not too early but early enough,
because we had a 3 hour drive ahead
before we reached our destination.
We had a two-lane road through the mountains to reach I-70 and
we enjoyed the mountain views.
(This isn't too bad of a picture for rolling down my window,
pointing and shooting, while traveling 45mph.)
Our first "official" stop was to see the Dotsero Crater (which is a dormant volcano).
We knew how to get to Dotsero, but not to the crater.
There were no signs pointing to where it may be located.
We picked a road to try... it ended with a parking lot for some trails.
We decided to ask a guy who was loading up his bicycle if he knew where it was.
He was a local who'd lived there for many years...
he'd never heard of it and had no clue there was a volcano.
So Jeff decided to try to call the city offices and all he got was a message.
The guy then pulled up and said that his wife thought it was behind some trailers as you got off of I-70.
So we start heading back the way we came.
We drove, what seemed like a frontage road, and we finally came to what you may call a "trailer park".
We decide we would take this little road that seemed to be going up the mountain.
The sign that was posted when entering that road said something like this:
Dangerous Road
Enter at your own risk.
There may be large trucks that may be unable to stop.
Of course there was no stopping us.
After seeing some volcanic rock along the road we decide we must be in the right spot!
We viewed and then we collected some volcanic rock to bring home.
We never saw any large trucks, but there was a rock quarry at the top
which is where the large trucks would have be coming from.
The one truck we saw, was an employee for the area, and he stopped to tell me
to keep the kids close because there were mountain lions around.
We hit I-70 again and traveled through the Glenwood Canyon.
We decide to eat lunch before we got to Glenwood Springs, so we exited at a rest area,
and ended up having a beautiful spot, next to the river, to picnic at and to take some photos.
After the extended stop, we headed into Glenwood Springs and went to the Glenwood Caverns.
We rode up in these,
which the boys enjoyed and Kaylie did not.
When we got there we found out that we would have to hang around
for a couple of hours for the first opening for the cavern tours.
This free SpeleoBox saved us!
We weren't going to spend money on the few rids they had and we had time to kill.
From my understanding, there were 4-5 levels that the kids had to crawl and
even army crawl to get through. It was practice for people who are exploring caves.
(In the second picture the kids are giving a thumbs up.)
We were ready for our 4:00 tour and the 50 degree temps down in the cavern.
as we were waiting for our tour guide to show, this girl walks by...
and Tanner starts to sing Cruella Deville from 101 Dalmatians. :o)
The kids loved our tour guide,
and it was very fascinating.
(I took a ton of pics but I'm not going to bore you all,
I just wish I could remember all the facts that were shared about them.)
We then finished our time there with me snapping a few photos of the kids.
We then ate some supper and drove back in the dark.
We returned to the cabin around 11:00 pm.
