Photos from the last few weeks

We’re into week 5 of our trip already!! Time has flown by but here’s some photos from the past few weeks:

Arches National Park

Canyonlands National Park

Canyonlands National Park Part 2

Hiking down the Grand Canyon

Sara and Craig in the Grand Canyon

The garden in the Belaggio

Zion National Park - The Narrows

Craig in Bryce National Park

Bryce National Park aka Dr. Seussland

Bryce National Park

Salt Flats

Walla Walla Washington Sara's favorite city

All the national parks were amazing! Craig’s been busy interviewing lots of interesting people for his website and I’ve been busy being his groupie! Hopefully, now that were in civilization again we’ll do a better job of posting new photos and interesting stories.

We’re currently in Portland and we’ll be here thru Thursday.

Next stop….Seattle.

 

America the B.E.A.utiful Day 2 (Craig is rolling his eyes)

Greetings from Arches National Park, Utah,

We left Denver yesterday and drove 363 miles to Moab, Utah which is close to Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park (not to be confused with Candyland). This first week we are taking it easy and visiting some national parks to do some hiking. Later this week we’ll hit Bryce Canyon and Grand Canyon before ending up in Las Vegas early next week. We are staying in downtown Moab at the cheapest campground around that has a shower.

On the surface the campground seems great being in a wooded area with a swimming pool and free wifi. Almost nobody is in the remote area we chose and we quickly discovered why…it’s right behind the La Quinta Inn. The hotel mocks our choosing length over comfort on the trip with it’s bright parking lot lights and loud guests. However, we’re currently using their wifi to write this blog so it all works out!

More to come in the following days.

Check out the link at the top of this page that says “Road Trip Schedule” to see where we’re going to be and when! We’ll try to update this page as we go along.

Our Campsite (good view)

Our Campsite (bad view)

us at one of the arches

it's very quiet here

 

Our Next Adventure

Change is in the air again…

Sara gave her 2 week notice at work.
We sold our funky green couch on Craig’s List.
Sara got an iPhone.
On October 10th we leave Denver for an 8-month cross country road trip.
We’ll be sightseeing, hanging with friends, visiting non-profit orgs & interviewing people for Recycle Your Faith.
Check out the map below for a preview of some of the places we will be visiting.




View Larger Map

 

A Change in Plans

The past couple weeks have been pretty stressful with the house purchase. Long story short, the deal got more complicated as the house went through HUD inspections, FHA inspections and our own inspections. We were being required by FHA to hire contractors to do a laundry list of improvements within 60 days, most of which we were planing to do ourselves over time. The costs kept on increasing and finally last night Sara and I realized that it was too much. So, we walked away. We’re sad, but it’s all good. Life goes on.

Your next question is, what next? We’re not exactly sure at the moment, but we have a few ideas up our sleeves. We’ll keep you posted.

To be continued…

 

2/53

Now that most of the snow has melted off the mountains, it’s mountain climbing season! This past weekend we climbed Gray’s Peak in preparation for this upcoming weekend’s more significant climb, Long’s Peak. Grays is our second “fourteener” in colorado since moving out, there are a total of 53 peaks in Colorado taller than 14,000 feet, so we have our work cut out for us!

We left our apartment around 5:30AM and were hiking by 7. The road up to the trail is a dirt road with some crazy bumps, after a few hundred feet in our 2 wheel drive Santa Fe we were confronted by some bumps that we weren’t convinced we could make, so we just parked our car at the bottom of the road (which added an extra 3 miles). As we walked up the road we figured that since hikers are generally nice people, someone would offer to give us a ride up, right? wrong. Jeep after jeep people passed us. after a while I (craig) started looking at the trucks as they passed and tried to look pathetic. It didn’t work. Some cars had 4-5 people in them, but most had 1 or 2. This was frustrating. Soon enough we got to the trailhead and it was a zoo. Turns out that hiking on a weekend isn’t an original idea in colorado. There were probably 60-70 vehicles and the trail looked like a highway, and it was just 8 in the morning!

We got to the top around 11AM or so, ate lunch and started heading back. The reason you start hiking so early is to avoid afternoon thunderstorms, which are inevitable. Today was no exception. The rain clouds rolled in as we hiked down, but we were fortunate enough to get back down to the trailhead before it started raining. The only problem was that our car wasn’t at the trailhead, it was 3 miles down the road! But surely someone would pick us up on the way down when it’s raining, right? After 7 or so cars passed us up the rain turned into hail and we began to loose hope. Who was going to pick up two soaking wet hikers? Luckily a carload of college students found pity on us and came to our rescue. whew!

All in all it was a great trip. Looking forward to Longs next weekend. It’s about the same height, but you start from a lower elevation and it’s a tougher climb…we’ll update ya next week!

Also, no new news on the house. Hopefully we’ll get a closing date this week, but until then everything is in a holding pattern.

Hope you all are doing great!

Sara & Craig

Hiking up the road

The trailhead. You can't see the summit here, but it's higher than the peaks in the shot.

hiking through a field of wild flowers

A shot from the summit of Gray's Peak

Sara hanging with some shabby looking mountain goats