Monday June 18th: Boulder CO and back to Golden

We went to Boulder in the morning.  We figured we would do the same thing we did the day before in Golden.  Find the info center and just pick what local things looked good.  I did have one visitor's guide in the car with some suggestions and there was a trail that looked interesting in the Flat Irons and some tour possibilities.  We started downtown at the pedestrian mall area.  It was early and not everything was open yet but the day was looking to be another very hot one so we wanted to start early.  We also wanted time to go back to Golden and go to the Colorado School of Mines Geology museum in the afternoon.
Boulder had a very strange vibe to it.  Ben and I weren't overly comfortable there.  I was surprised because of all the great things I'd heard/read about Boulder and it wasn't at all what I expected.  It was very, very consumer driven.  Downtown was touristy very high end shopping.  But there were a lot of homeless and/or burned out people wandering the streets the morning we were there.   The edges of town were tons of big box store and other shopping.  The other part of town we saw was very, very college culture.  Not high academics college culture, like head shops and import store college culture.  It all seemed very contrived and managed.
We road that little electric train and the kids enjoyed that.  We also found Maya a baseball cap to help keep her cooler on these really hot days.
Then we bolted and went back to Golden.

The geology museum was a nice break from the heat and a really nice museum too.  Not as large as the mineral museum at Michigan Tech but had some very nice specimens on display.  And some fun interactive things the kids liked.  Our kids are kind of nerdy that way though :)
After we were done we went to the big park along the river and had our picnic lunch and let the kids play on the playground for a while.

After lunch we drove up Lookout Mountain and got a nice view of downtown Denver and north and south table mountains with the town of Golden kind of in between.  There is a Buffalo Bill museum at the top and his grave site.  We walked up to the grave for a little hike but decided to skip the museum.

Sunday June 17th: Golden CO area

Sunday morning we had to take some time to clean up the apartment, return the keys and get the car repacked with the addition of Ben's luggage.  Once we got going we drove to Golden.  We parked and walked around town for a little while and picked up some brochures from their information center so we could pick some things we might want to do in the area.  The first thing that caught Alex's eye was Dinosaur Ridge.  We went there first and it was a good thing because the day was heating up fast.

It's a self guided walk along a closed road with a pretty good incline...no shade.  Both kids were troopers, we brought along a backpack with water and stopped as we needed to to rest.

These footprints were amazing.  Really cool.

From the crest of the road we could see Red Rocks Amphitheater in the distance.  Beautiful!

Prehistoric crocodile footprint.

By the time we were done at Dinosaur Ridge it was very hot.  Alex said it felt like it must be 100 degrees.  Turns out he was close, it was a record high that day and was 98.  We needed to find a break from the heat so we went back into Golden and decided to have a picnic and then go on the Coors Brewery tour.  No we were not the only people taking our kids on the brewery tour, there were tons of other people there with the whole family.

Alex was really into it, I think he listened to my audio device (it's a self guided audio tour, you get a little device on a lanyard to listen to as you walk) more than I did.  They go into great detail about the ingredients and science of the brewing process.  

These are the faces of children who never get soda being given free huge cups of whatever soda they wanted.  And allowed refills.

This is the face of a man getting 3 free full size beer "samples" at the end of the tour.

My face is the face of the gluten intolerant person who doesn't like soda trying to pretend I'm having as much fun as everyone else in the sampling lounge at the end of the brewery tour.

After the tour we decided given the fact it was late afternoon and so hot that our best course of action would be to go check in to our motel and go swimming for the evening and find a good dinner somewhere.  So we did.

Saturday June 16th - Thorton CO

I have no pictures from this day.  It was a recovery/errand day.  We had to drive out by the airport and return Ben's rental car.  We had been eating breakfast and lunch on our own, usually free breakfast at the motel supplemented with some of our own food and picnic lunches out of the cooler so we had to grocery shop to refill our coolers.  We had to do laundry.  You know, really fun stuff.  It was a rough day for the kids because we didn't have exciting plans to look forward to but yet they weren't at home and they only had the same stuff they'd been reading and playing with in the car for the last 5 days and they were off their regular schedule.  We did make some time in the afternoon to visit the game room and swimming pool at the apartment complex.  In the evening Ben took them over to a field nearby that was swarming with prairie dogs including some babies while I took care of downloading all the pictures of Alex's camera and my camera so we could start fresh the next day.  And I mapped out our route for the next few days and got motel reservations.

More from June 15th - Needles Hwy

There is a big problem in the Black Hills (and throughout the west I believe) with Pine Beetle infestations.  There were large swaths of dead pine trees on every peak.  A lot of the areas had been partially cleared both to try and reduce the spread of the beetles and to reduce fire risk from the stands of dead trees.  It made many of the areas look a lot less natural and very clearly "managed".

Sylvan Lake looked beautiful and there was a trail but Maya was done.  Done. by this point and we just popped out to take a picture and then had to get on our way.

The most direct route from where we were in the Black Hills down to where Ben was took us through some very rural areas of Wyoming.  We were off the interstate but the speed limits were still 70 or 75 mph.  I guess they figure there really isn't anything to hit??  A big thunderstorm was rolling in and we got to see some pretty amazing lightening out over the prairie.  Alex was back being stuck with just cows to look at.  Although we did see a few big flocks of sheep.  We skirted the edge of the storm and got to watch it from a distance.  I wish I would have stopped to get some pictures of those clouds over the vast fields and little plateaus in the distance but by the time I felt we were on a portion of road that was safe to pull off to the side of it wasn't nearly as impressive.

We got to the apartment complex where Ben was staying a little bit before 8pm.

Friday June 15th: Custer, SD to Thorton, CO via Custer State Park and the Needles Highway

We had gotten in to Custer the night before with enough time to find a good dinner and have an hour or so to swim.  The place we stayed was very nice.  The kids loved the fancy (fake) waterfall in the back.  It was nice to be able to eat breakfast on the patio.

You will notice that Alex is into "funny" faces on this day.

We started out doing some hiking.  Maya tired out pretty fast on this day.  After a while she didn't want to get out of the car every time so sometimes we stopped and Alex and I got out to take pictures and she just stayed in the car.  After right away in the morning we didn't do much hiking.

We did the Wildlife Loop through Custer State park.  At first we weren't seeing much (it was a fairly hot day) but were finally rewarded with some Pronghorn, then of course the Prairie Dog town, the burrows and the bison.  In fact we got stuck in a bison "traffic jam" for a while which both kids thought was just awesome.  It cracked them up when we saw the bison all lined up at the entrance to a campground.  Alex had to quickly roll up his window at one point because one very large one was so close he could have stuck his head in the car.  Maya loved seeing all the babies.