Sunday morning, June 30, I woke up to a birthday breakfast in bed in our RV from the one and only.

After a relaxing morning – maybe the first morning this trip Chris wasn’t pestering me to get moving (it was my birthday after all) – we packed up camp and set out on a scenic drive through Rocky Mountain as we made our way to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. The drive was beautiful as we drove over the Rockies to the highest point in the road, across the continental divide, and down the western side of the park, seeing fields of elk along the way. The pilot was working over-time to get our trailer up the mountain so we stopped at the visitor’s center at the top which is only open 4 months of the year due to snow – which was still piled high!

The way down was also slow as we didn’t want to put a lot of strain on the brakes going downhill. It was this drive that we decided to use the 2 and 1 gear shifts because shifting down while going downhill would give our brakes a break. No pun intended. We are glad we figured that out as that has been a lifesaver going up and down the mountains in Colorado and we definitely have a little more empathy for truck drivers now.

Towards the end of the scenic drive, a storm quickly moved in leaving us scrambling on the side of the road to get the bikes covered since Chris was convinced “it’s not going to rain today so I’m not covering the bikes”. Chris then took over for the rest of the drive to Black Canyon which consisted of giving up finding a restaurant that was open for lunch, google maps taking us 20 miles down a dirt road (very bumpy – I was not a fan), lots of storms, an amazing full double rainbow, and ended with dinner at a nice restaurant at a golf course called Creekside.

A little backstory here – Chris did have dinner planned at a sushi place in town but forgot to check what time they were open and turns out, they’re closed on Sundays. So, I ended up finding Creekside and due to their closing time, we would have to go to dinner before checking in to our campsite. That only left me to get changed and ready in the RV in the restaurant parking lot. Very classy over here. To make matters worse, when we opened the door to the RV to get ready, we discovered a catastrophe of a living space. Apparently, the dirt road did not treat the organization very well. The table had collapsed causing the salt and pepper shakers to explode everywhere. Cabinets and closets had opened up with everything falling out and rolling all over the floor and benches and spreading the salt and pepper into every crack and corner you could find. Just my luck! Chris got changed quick and went into the restaurant to make sure they would stay open for us. I cleaned up quick and got changed and finally we sat down for a relaxing dinner with cocktails. This was by far the best meal we have had on this trip. I never thought I would say this, but their Brussel Sprouts were to die for. After a free birthday treat for dessert, we headed to check into our campsite.

Another late night finding our site in the dark and Chris being paranoid about how much noise we were making pulling in. The following morning, (July 1), we set up camp and then headed into the town of Montrose to find some wifi for Chris to do work again. We found a nice coffee shop where we were able to sit outside and both of us were able to get some work done. We stopped in at a Mexican restaurant called “Mi Mexico” for lunch and then tried to beat the storm back to our campsite.

It only rained for a few minutes (weather in Colorado is weird) and then we got ready to drive the South Rim of the canyon, stopping at the visitor’s center and scenic viewpoints, and ending at the Sunset View point for sunset photography. Of course, we didn’t leave ourselves enough time before sunset and had to skip the last viewpoints to make it in time for Chris to set up his camera gear for sunset pictures. I settled on journaling and watching the beauty of the sun as it dipped behind the mountains in the distance.

After sunset, we decided to stop at the viewpoints we skipped on our way back to camp and realized that was a poor decision as we couldn’t see anything in the dark. But it was still good quality time. Back at camp, we broke out our propane fire pit because we were too lazy to make a real fire. We had cheese and crackers and wine for dinner (it’s becoming a common meal) and star gazed at the millions of stars you could see in the clear night sky. Black Canyon is a national dark sky park – you could see the Milky Way with the naked eye! After Chris got a few star trails photos, we retired for the night. The plan for Tuesday was to wake up early and drive to the visitor’s center in order to get a permit to hike the wilderness down into the canyon. We got there around 8:15am and come to find out they already gave out all their permits for the day for the route we wanted. Upon further inquiry, we found out they only give out 15 permits for the day. As Chris muttered his disapproval of such a small number of daily permits, we signed up for a permit for a different route called the Tomichi route which was in full sun and completely loose rock the whole way down. Regardless of it not being the route we wanted, we set off with high spirits which quickly turned to fearful spirits for me as the route almost immediately went straight downhill.

Contrary to the norm, I am actually much slower going downhill than up. Although Chris was almost always 50 yards ahead and disappeared at times, he was very patient with me (and took lots of selfies) as we slowly made our way down the cliff to the river below. It probably was a good thing he was so far ahead because I was constantly causing rock slides as I half climbed/half slid down. The descent took us about 2 hours and my legs were jelly when we finally reached the bottom.

We hiked up the river a bit to find a rock to lay out on and eat lunch. Way too early for my liking, Chris prepared to hike back up, anticipating it would take us triple the amount of time it took us to get down. I convinced him to stay and relax for another half hour, taking a few dips in the freezing water which felt pretty good in the 90-degree heat.

After seeing a snake slither through the grasses, I decided it was time to begin our ascent. Miraculously, it only took us 2 hours to make the 1900 ft. vertical ascent (including stoppage time to catch our breath) and this time I was usually ahead of Chris. This was the first time this trip Chris was actually impressed by how quick I was at doing something.

By the time we reached the top, we had run out of water, were dripping in sweat, and ready to collapse. However, that still didn’t keep us from driving to see 3 more viewpoints we had missed and plenty of beautiful summer flowers before going back to camp.

As quick as our weak legs could move, we packed up camp, chugged a bunch of water from the spigot that the park had hauled to get there (water is scarce there), and set out for Mesa Verde National Park.

We stopped at Applebee’s and got carside to go which was a little difficult with a huge trailer in the parking lot. I probably should have listened to Chris’ wishes for Wendy’s because Applebee’s salads weren’t any better. I have found this trip that there is beginning to be a trend for me of being extremely disappointed by the food I’m craving. Hopefully that trend changes soon. Chris drove the rest of the way to Mesa Verde where, yet again, we arrived and backed into our campsite in the dark. It was at this point that Chris realized our sewer hose and connector had fallen out of the back compartment somewhere along our travels so the following day, he asked the neighbors to borrow what he needed to hook our sewer up and they told us we could have it “as a wedding gift” lol. Our day at Mesa Verde started with an early morning (8am) tour of Square Tower House. Mesa Verde is the only national park that preserves something man-made. The park has somewhere around 1500 pueblo cliff dwellings, only a couple hundred of them accessible. Very few of them are self-guided so we had to sign up for tours with a park ranger to view them firsthand, climbing down ladders along the cliff to access them.

The ranger we had in the morning was kind of a weirdo and very opinionated, trying to get the group into a debate the whole time on if we should be protecting and reinforcing these cliff dwellings for the future to be able to see or if we should let nature run its course and have them deteriorate back into the Earth. (They are currently in the process of reinforcing one, costing 12 million dollars to do so.) Of course, his plan worked and our very opinionated group did get into a debate that made the tour run an hour over and caused me a lot of discomfort as I was waiting to get back in order to use the restroom and eat breakfast (I was hangry). Chris was also bothered that the ranger told us not to dig up the holes that “ant lions” made to trap ants to eat in front of him. Hopefully we see another ant lion hole along our travels. Chris will definitely be digging it up. We did meet a cool family of 4 on our tour who started their own business called American Wanderer which takes groups of kids between the ages of 11-17 on weekly trips to national parks in the area. We thought that was pretty cool. After our tour of square tower house, Chris and I headed to finally use the bathroom and get a bite to eat. I saw they had grilled cheese on the menu which I was actually pretty excited for but fitting with the trend of food disappointment, my grilled cheese came out with toasted bread and 2 cold slices of cheese between it. My hanger still not fully satisfied, I settled for 2 monster chocolate chip cookies. We toured the museum at Mesa Verde and then decided to stop at some of the scenic viewpoints on our 35-minute drive back to our campsite, also seeing some wild horses. Still rather exhausted from our Black Canyon hike the morning before, we lazily hung out at camp, I did laundry, and then we both got a nap in before our evening tours. We were actually so tired that we slept through our first tour at Balcony House which we later regretted after hearing it was the coolest tour. I remembered that we still had laundry in the dryer so we gathered our things and headed to our second tour, Cliff Palace, stopping at the laundromat on our way. Yet again, we had quite the memorable group that we toured Cliff Palace with. We met a couple from New Zealand who was visiting USA for a month and they were pretty cool. Our tour guide was very long-winded and a lot of the tour consisted of sitting on rock and listening while he blabbed and became very annoyed with a group of girls who constantly interrupted asking (for lack of a better term) stupid questions (and not even listening to his answer) such as “What did the Puebloans do about air conditioning?”, “How did they keep their food fresh”, and walking on the historic walls right after he got done explaining not to out of respect. They also took a gazillion pictures, holding the tour up constantly and making huge gaps which the guide specifically asked them not to do. Anyway, we did learn a decent amount about these historic people and got to see how they used to live.

I’m not sure if we would return to Mesa Verde – we saw most of the park – but if we did, we would explore the Weatherill Mesa side as we drove 20 minutes down that road to the Step House just to find out it was closed for the day.  We finally showered when we got back and I spent the evening facetiming Marinn (we had free wifi here) while Chris cooked up some leftovers for another late dinner. We retired “early” since we planned on getting up early to head to the 4 corners monument before it was too crowded.