First journey over

I have now reached my fathers place in Washington. Thereby ending my first journey west. I will now fill in the blanks in this journey with my computer and work on the issues updating this blog with my phone.

Utah here we come

Next we headed out of Colorado following a steep winding road that took us up over an eleven thousand foot pass very fun in the WRX.

Once we got in Utah we headed for Mesa Verde. It was an interesting park; more of historical park than a natural one. We bought tickets for the ranger led tours and saw the pueblos close up. We saw the hidden palace on our first your which was an incredible site seeing this whole village nestled on the side of a cliff.

Then we went to balcony house which was a much more interesting experience. This one had us climbing up 30 meter ladders crawling through tunnels and scaling cliffs with 25+ mph winds blowing at us.

Mom prank of 2013

After months of planning, lying, and trickery the great mom prank of 2013 has been pulled off. We aren't sure whose idea it was to not tell mom that all 5 of her kids would be gathering to meet her on her vacation this year, but they are an evil genius. We chose a state park in western colorado, rifle falls state park, to pull off the prank in. Tricia had told mom that she had arranged a surprise mothers day picnic for her to throw her off the scent. The original plan was for us to meet them at the waterfall lookout and surprise her there. But they got to the park while Malia was talking to the park ranger to make sure they went to the falls first. Luckily Sean was on lookout and saw them approaching and yelled out a warning in time for malia to hide or the gig would have been up.


I'll put a video here of the surprise once I get my computer setup and it uploaded to youtube.

App issues

Using an app on my phone to create these posts and just found an issue with it. It seems the app runs into memory issues when trying to add pictures to my posts. It tries to load sample images of all the pictures on my phone. With the number and size of the pictures on my phone the app runs out of memory. I'm going to have to start uploading them to dropbox or to my google drive.

So for now I'm going to have to create these posts without having pics in them for now.

Hanging lake and Ouray

Before all that nonsense with the car we went for a hike up hanging lake. Hanging lake is a really cool lake just off I70.It's an out and back one mile hike straight up.



Taking a break from camping mom rented us a cabin for two nights in Ouray. Sean and I went up the nearby hill to get more high altitude training in. We started at 8 thousand feet at the base of a waterfall

Then went to 10.3 thousand feet to the top of it for around 7 miles if hiking.

Flat tires suck

On our way out of our campsite I saw the low tire pressure light come on in my car. We were about 2 miles from the nearest paved road. Luckily i had planned ahead and put my spare tire in the backseat of the car so I didn't have to unload the entire trunk first. Unluckily this happened on mother's day which is a sunday. All the tire shops within 70 miles were closed. The nearest open one was a walmart back near where we stayed the night before. Once I got there they let me know that the didn't have the tools to fix my tire. The guy at walmart called a guy who runs a specialty car repair shop that was willing to come down and fix it for only $25. When he fixed it he pulled a broken knife blade out of my tire. It was about 1" wide by 1/2"deep. I'm not sure where I got it since it wasn't deep enought to have penetrated my tire without hitting a rock just right. I also noticed that I has gotten to close to a bush at on point and have some scratches in my paint. They look like the are just in the clear coat and should buff out with a good wax.

Colorado cruising and camping

Heading down to colorado for the big surprise of mom. I had a day to myself to drive around. Took a side trip on a really fun dirt road. It had some crazy S turns on it. My car is now brown. From there I went down to RMNP which was snowing like crazy.

So I bailed on that place and drove to western colorado and camped in the white river national forest. Very pretty. There was a mountain there that reminded me of denali.

Got up early hoping to catch the sun rising on the mountain but snow blocked my way. I did get some good pictures of the nearby mountain.

High altitude training

Spending some time out in wyoming with tricia. Just doing a few short hikes to get used to the altitude.

Also to get used to the snow...

Lots and lots of driving

Made it to Tricia's after another 10+ hour driving day. That should be the last one of those for this trip.

Westward Ho

With the bad weather gone I'm back on the road for a long day of driving. First stop is St Louis to visit the gateway to the west and look at the arch.


It's big. Didn't get to go in and up to the top since I didn't want to leave the bike out unattended for that long.

From there it was off to Kansas to camp for the night.

Old friends and bears

I stopped off in Columbus to visit an old computer game friend. We played board, video, and card games and remembered our past video game glories. Good times.

I ended up staying a couple extra days due to some expected bad weather in Kansas. With my extra days I went to see the Columbus zoo. It is very nice zoo the gorillas and polar bears were the highlights.
Not often you get to see a polar bear swimming above your head and live to tell the tale.

The First Journey West Begins

Sitting in a rest stop on I 70 after leaving Frederick. This was the last rest stop that I stopped at when I first moved to Maryland. I seemed appropriate to stop here when I leave Maryland. From here I'm taking I70 all the way out to Denver then cutting up to Tricia's in Wyoming.