I'm Back

I'm back from a wonderful family vacation.  We started out visiting an old mining town in the Colorado mountains.  The historical society is working on restoring it, and there are several original structures, plus the area around the town is simply beautiful.  I really want to go back in the fall and see the colors.

Our next stop was the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.  One of the cliff walls is nearly two times the height of the Empire State Building.  I had pretty much filled both SD cards in my camera by the end of that day.

We drove through the San Juan mountains to get to Mesa Verde next.  Cliff Palace was of course phenomenal, but the best part of the trip was getting a tour of Long House from a Native American ranger, with only 7 people in our group.  (I was stuck with my camera phone for some of Mesa Verde since I didn't realize how closely I'd come to filling my SD cards until it was too late).

My kids and me on the Petroglyph trail, it was hot!

We were planning on visiting the Four Corners and Kasha Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument, but we realized we wouldn't have time to do both, so we skipped Four Corners.  That was the right decision as the hike was absolutely breathtaking and practically looked like we were on another planet.

After Kasha Katuwe Tent Rocks we drove down to Santa Fe for several days, then to Taos (which wasn't that impressive and luckily that's the only day we got rained out), then we came back to Colorado to visit Bent's Old Fort and the site of the Sandcreek Massacre.

San Miguel, it's supposed to be the oldest chapel in the US.

This trip was mostly for my husband, who taught Colorado history for about 15 years; and my son, who just finished 4th grade where he studied and was enthralled by all of this information.  Here are the best things about vacation:

• Getting to spend concentrated time with my favorite people in the world.
• Seeing new things and gaining a different perspective.
• Unplugging from my day-to-day of my life.
• Coming home again, because I appreciate it so much more!

And...I accidentally hit publish instead of save at one point while I was writing this post, so some of you will probably see an unfinished version, and the real version.  I'm supposed to be refreshed at this point and less likely to make mistakes.  Sigh...