Last week was such a fun week. On the way home from our family farm visit, we decided to make an impromptu weekend road trip across the state to Durango with visits to Mesa Verde and Great Sand Dunes NP. I just love that we can make last minute plans like that then hop in the car, drive 6 hours and be at these amazing places. Here’s just a snapshot of our trip. We average about 100 photos per day on our trips and this one was no exception – over 400 photos were taken (although only about 75 were actually good). For those who follow me on Facebook, a few more can be seen there.
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We left Thursday afternoon – Ryan’s mom flew into town to visit her new granddaughter, Ella, and took Sadie up to the mountains with her so we wouldn’t have to worry about keeping her at the hotel/in the car when we visited the national parks. A big thank you to her and the Veenstras who so graciously doggy-sat with a 1-week-old newborn!
The drive went super well – since we hit Sonora’s afternoon nap, we didn’t have to make many stops and she wasn’t fussy at all. When she woke up, we just read some books in the back and ate some snacks. However, a huge setback to the trip was receiving an astronomical speeding ticket (a total speed trap, by the way) a couple hours before we got to Durango. It cost us more than the trip would have cost us TOTAL. So frustrating. But aside from that, the drive was great.
Since we arrived around 7pm, we didn’t do much that night except for eat our picnic dinner at the park, take a quick drive through town and then settle in at the hotel. There we were entertained by watching Sonora prance around the hotel room and find all sorts of “gifts” (soap, shampoo, cups) around the room. She also LOVED playing on the bed. Kids are hilarious. Anyway, we just relaxed, snacked and watched tv before we hit the sack early.
The next day was our trip to Mesa Verde. It was about an hour and a half away from Durango so we left bright and early in order to beat the heat and get a full day in. Mesa Verde is so crazy – I just can’t imagine traipsing through the mountains and valley then settling down and literally living in the rocks. What a cool piece of history to see.
We saw pretty much all the sites that were open there before we headed back to Durango. We ordered some pizza and after picking it up, ate it in a park along the Animas river in Durango. Then we took a little walk across the bridge and played in some sculptures before we went back to the hotel to relax and watch a movie.
On Saturday we just meandered around Durango. We started at the railroad museum to see some of the famous Durango to Silverton train paraphernalia, then we walked around downtown checking out some of the shops. After that we took a drive up to the top of Fort Lewis to check out a view of the city – gorgeous. For lunch we stopped at Bread, a favorite cafe of our good friend, Meghan, and then took a drive out to Honeyville just north of town to get a taste of some local honey, honey wine and see some bees at work. To end our day, we visited the fish hatchery to feed some fish and popped in the little museum to chat with a sweet old man about local wildlife. Sonora even got to get up close and personal with a bear – in her words: RAOWR! Right before we headed back to the hotel, we took a little walk along the Animas to watch rafters and sit for a while listening to and watching the rasta festival happening in a nearby park.
Since Sonora woke up at the crack of dawn on Sunday, we decided to skip the Taste of Durango and leave a lot earlier than we’d planned in order to make it to Great Sand Dunes by early afternoon. This turned out to be a great decision because we once again hit Sonora’s nap time for the 2-hour drive, had perfect weather for hiking the dunes and made it back home at a reasonable hour. We had a great time hiking the dunes and it was totally worth the stop on the way back. After hiking up nearly 650 feet to one of the top dunes (Star Dune), we could see the entire dunefield below. Then we got to run down and play in the stream at the bottom to cool off and have Sonora’s first official “beach day”. It was super warm and the perfect depth for babies and kids.
View along the way.
Almost there!
We made it!
View from one way.
View from the other way.
Tiny Ryan heading back down the dunes.
This was such a fabulous trip. I mean, I enjoyed our trip through South Dakota on our way back to IL and MI – Mt. Rushmore and Badlands were neat to see – but Sonora is now at the age where she can do so much more which makes it a lot easier on us and way more enjoyable. And I highly recommend going to these places, to anyone. Beautiful scenery along the way, Durango is a really cute town (and a good place to do some rafting/ATV adventures), Mesa Verde is such a cool historical site, and the Dunes were just so huge and the play time at the bottom was fun for all of us.
I can’t wait to keep having more family adventures like this.
Love,
Laura