- 37 degrees at 7:00 am
- putting in my contact that had been in contact solution in the near-freezing temps overnight
- having to wear socks with my Chacos since my tennis shoes were still wet from the snow
Thankfully our destination for the day was Mesa Verde, a national park in the southwestern corner of Colorado (aka...much warmer). Mesa Verde is an area of mesas where the Anasazi, or "ancestral puebloans" as we learned is the new PC term, built cliff dwellings hundreds of years ago. Due to my upbringing, I am unable to go through areas like Mesa Verde without hunting for wildlife, so Steve turned around when I spotted a couple of deer resting in the shade of a tree. I hopped out of the Jeep to take a picture, and after a few minutes, the buck stood up and just stared at me. I'm sure he wouldn't have charged me, but his attitude did convince me to go ahead and leave him alone! Plus I got better pictures when he stood up!
Mesa Verde was actually a really neat place. I strolled through the museum while Steve visited the boys' room, and there was SO much to see! They had artifacts they had discovered at the sites, including pottery, tools, corn, moccasins, jewelry...all sorts of stuff! We didn't want to take the ranger guided tours, so we visited the self-guided sites. It was amazing to think of people living there and building all those dwellings! We even got to climb down in a kiva, an underground room usually reserved for religious ceremonies.
Since we wanted to get as far east as possible before camping since Saturday started our trip home, we left Mesa Verde and drove until about 7:30 when we finally found a camping site somewhere in the Rio Grande National Forest. Of course we had to stop a few times on the way there to get pictures of a deer...
and some turkeys.
Finally we set up camp in a beautiful area right along the river for our last night of camping.
No comments:
Post a Comment