Our Coolest Family Road Trip Yet

We tried to think of a cool, but inexpensive, trip to take this summer. We decided to combine camping with a road trip. Our route: Fort Collins to Colorado National Monument [Grand Junction], through the mountains to Durango, to Sand Dunes National Park, and home through Pueblo.

Colorado National Monument
One of our main reasons for choosing CNM was the Dinosaur Journey Museum located nearby. We figured this would be the highlight of our stay in Fruita, which is near Grand Junction, in western Colorado. The highlight was most definitely not the Grand Junction shopping mall, which was curiously filled with pregnant teenagers and punk kids. While the museum was cool, the highlight of our stay was our camping spot.

We ended up on top of a bluff in the CNM park, nearly at the edge of a cliff, staring at a huge expanse of red-rock walls across the valley below. Seth got up early and took amazing photos of an incredible sunrise. The campsite even had flushing potties…and cell reception…happy mama. We walked on trails around the park, and found places where dinosaur bones had been excavated. We saw Balanced Rock, and several other formations that the boys gleefully pointed out whenever we drove past. Walking along the tops of plateaus had me sort of freaked out, so I spent a lot of time trying to drill safety into the boys’ memories. At one point, after I had, yet again, warned the boys to stay away from the cliff edges, Alex said, “If you jump off the cliff, you'll die & all your bones will be breaked." Message received.

Our original plan was to stay two nights at CNM, but there wasn’t enough to do to keep us busy. Plus, it was really hot. So, we decided to spend an extra day in Durango.

Mountains

We drove to Durango through the San Juan Mountains. We passed through several towns, but Telluride and Ouray were by far the most impressive. Telluride was stunning – it’s nestled in the mountains, among lakes and streams and green-covered red mountains. We drove on the “Million Dollar Highway” to Ouray. We walked around Ouray, which is an old mining town with a cute downtown and beautiful scenery. It was interesting to see how the San Juan Mountains differed from the Rocky Mountains, mostly in color.

Durango
This was the first time we’d ever been to Durango. I expected it to be similar to Grand Junction, but the only similarity I could see was the southern location. Actually, Durango reminded me a lot of Fort Collins – college town, a river the town uses for recreation, quaint downtown. We ate dinner at a great little Mexican restaurant called Gazpacho’s.

We stayed in a little cabin at a cool campground; our cabin was right next to a little stream, which the boys absolutely loved. We spent two days sitting on the rocks in the streambed while the boys splashed around in the water, shaded by huge trees on the bank. Very relaxing. The campground also had bathrooms with showers, so everyone got cleaned up. Not surprisingly, the boys were pretty grimy after only a couple days, so the showers were appreciated. Mostly by me.

Since we had an extra day in Durango, we decided to check out Mesa Verde. We weren’t sure how the kids would do on the tours of the cliff dwellings, but we figured we’d give it a shot. The kids were the darlings of our tour group. They behaved so well, and charmed our group so that by the time we were climbing the exit ladder from the dwellings, the whole group was cheering the boys on. They enjoyed learning about the history of Mesa Verde, and climbing on ladders to get up and down the dwellings. Zach was brave enough to go down into a kiva with Seth, but it was too dark and enclosed for Alex’s taste. They saw lots of little lizards on the nature trail, which was pretty exciting…each and every time we saw one.

Sand Dunes

The boys loved the dunes – we walked on the sand, barefoot, and splashed in the inch of water flowing at the base of the huge dunes. The sand is amazing – it feels just like beach sand, with no ocean for thousands of miles. The dunes are in the middle of mountains and plains – it’s crazy to see huge mountains of sand surrounded by normal Colorado landscapes. We camped in the dunes park; the rangers told us to make sure to put anything with a scent of any kind into the bear-proof metal box at our campsite – including toiletries and make-up! Apparently, they’d had some trouble with bears in the park, which freaked us out a little. We didn’t see any bears, much to the boys’ dismay. We hiked in the mountains; Seth and the boys took an early morning hike, which led them to a beautiful waterfall. The rangers held an informative program at the campground amphitheater, where they talked about the different types of animals in the park.

The Ride Home

We drove home through Pueblo and Colorado Springs. In Pueblo, we found a tiny little Mexican restaurant that sold homemade, authentic tamales. Seth bought one for me, and as we drove away, I devoured it. Months later, I still dream of those tamales…I think a trip to southern Colorado will be on our agenda in 2011. I foresee a good portion of the back of our car being devoted to transporting muchos tamales back to my freezer.

Colorado Springs was experiencing incredible thunderstorms the day we drove through; we literally watched clouds pour buckets of rain as we drove from Pueblo to Denver. Fortunately, we made it through safely, and pulled into our driveway having logged a thousand in-state miles.