Denver Colorado to Mesa Verde
I had never been to Colorado at all, and with all the hype about Denver and the Mile High City, I definitely wanted to see that! We tend to be very frugal when we travel, so we deliberately chose a three leg journey from Boston MA in order to save some money on air fare. It being a very early flight out, I got about an hour sleep beforehand, and slept most of the way on each flight. We landed, headed over to the car rental counter and asked for our car.I'd requested a small SUV because we would be putting in a LOT of miles over the next few days over long stretches of perhaps rough roads. It was a bit early for snow, but you never knew what the weather would throw at you. Instead, they gave us a Jeep Liberty. We pointed out that this was rather large for our purposes, but that is what they had. Ah well, we hoped the MPG wouldn't hurt us too much with the number of miles we were about to put in! We headed out.
It was now about 1pm. Our sole aim for today was to end up at Mesa Verde, Colorado. Going the most direct route - 285 to 180 - is about 8 hours of straight driving. That's not enough for us :) We wanted to see pretty scenery! We opted instead to take 70 straight west through Silverthorne, turning south when we hit Copper Mountain. This took us down 91 - very pretty - to 24 before joining up to 285. Eventually we hit 112 to 160 across through Durango and out to Mesa Verde.
The drive was GORGEOUS. The mountains were in full foliage and there was snow up on the peaks. Some of the roads were extremely steep and we did see a truck in one of the 'runaway truck' ramps. The Eisenhower Tunnel goes beneath the Continental Divide and is at 11,013 feet.
We saw many lovely mountains along the way, along with some sheep in the road :)
It was dark by the time we reached Mesa Verde. Note that once you reach the entrance area, it is still a LONG (45 minute or so) drive in to the lodge area. We saw a coyote along the way, running alongside the car! We have photos of him in tomorrow's slideshow since I put the photo in the "Mesa Verde" set of photos.
We were staying in the "kiva rooms" which are very nice and have a balcony, as well as comfy beds. I thought the comfy beds might be really important to our ability to get through this trip well, considering the long flight we had on no sleep, never mind the 10 hours in a car!
Route 70 Colorado Slideshow
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