After the wedding festivities I said good-bye to my girlfriends and said hello to my road tripping friends. I have known Zach and BJ since college. Amanda is Zach's wife and an amazing person! So I was super excited to road trip back with them to Wisconsin. Amanda was in charge of this part of the trip. All I knew is that we were going to do some hiking and then visit some friends in Nebraska. Amanda is the same type of travel planner that I am- very organized. The guys were laughing at Amanda's binder of travel info. They turned to me and asked, "Who has a binder with everything in it?" I answered, "You mean like this?" as I pulled out my own travel binder. LOL
Anyway.....while we were in Colorado we did a few fun things. Actually it was a lot of fun! Here are the highlights!

Breweries - Time to fess up. During the wedding we all had some to drink. Some is probably not strong enough of a word. We also stayed up late. Actually I should probably say that we stayed up really early! So the original plan for Saturday was to hit up some of the breweries in Fort Collins. None of us felt like beer. At least I didn't want anymore! We did stop quickly at New Belgium and Fort Collins breweries. They looked very fun. Next time I want to try some more beer there!

Estes Park - We drove to the KOA in Estes Park. There we had a super cute kabin. (It totally drove me crazy that they spelled everything with Ks!) It definitely did not feel like camping (or kamping) at all. Our kabin had a bed and a bunk, an overhead fan, electricity, oh yeah, and wifi! We loved the KOA. One day we even had breakfast of all you can eat pancakes there. If we wanted they also had ice cream at night.
One of the first things we did was to go on a history and ghost tour at the Stanley hotel. This hotel is the inspiration for "The Shining" and also part of "Dumb and Dumber" was filmed here. The hotel itself is pretty nice. The view is the best part of the whole thing. Now on to the tour. If you believe in ghosts and that, the tour was nice. If you like history, the tour was ok. If you like to watch people suckered into thinking they will find a ghost during the tour, the tour was fantastic. Disclaimer - I don't believe in ghosts. We had such a great time watching the other people on the tour eating up everything the guide was saying. "After you go up 3 flights of spiral staircase you may experience being light headed as we head into this very haunted floor" No, we just walked up a bunch of steps in some crazy altitude. Was the tour worth $15? Eh, not so much. But I did have fun.
The next day we got up crazy early in the morning to go hiking up Long's Peak. The guys wanted to get to the top. I wanted to get to Chasm Lake. One way it was 4 miles of difficult hiking. I had just run a 6 mile race a few weeks earlier, but I knew that hiking is a whole different beast. When they label a hike difficult, it IS difficult. It is like walking up a bunch of stairs for hours! We hiked above the tree line. We hiked in huge wind gusts! We hiked over a lot of snow. Finally I stopped and said that I could not go any further. I just couldn't do it. I didn't feel sick, I just knew that the last mile would take too much energy out of me. We had done 3 miles of hiking in over 4 hours. None of us had done much training to do that kind of work. I am sad that we were not able to go too far, but I just couldn't do it.
We did wander around downtown Estes Park. Lots of fun shops to look at. Lots of ice cream to eat! We also did a little mini golf course! It was this old course that was really fun. It seemed like it was on the edge of town. Amanda had known about it from another time she had been here. For supper we went to the Estes Park brewery. We definitely felt like beer that evening. Our poor waitress there though. She got everything about our order wrong. Then we had our final conversation. She said, "How was everything?" BJ answered, "This pizza was one of the best I've had in a while." Waitress then answers, "Really? Our pizza? Haven't you tried Chicagoland's best downtown?" We all sit there and don't know what to answer What do you say to that?
Then we went on our way to Nebraska!