After we left Deadwood we headed towards the Rocky Mountains and stayed at Estes Park. As we arrived at Estes Park at night we got up early for the sunrise over the mountains. Estes Park is valley surrounded by mountains and the view as amazing.
We packed up the car and headed to the Rocky Mountains National park. It cost us $15us to get in and the views were well worth the money as it is just breathtaking. There was snow all over the mountains and there were people skiing and trekking through the snow. It was such a beautiful day as the weather was perfect! We then headed to Cheyenne and then onto Montrose for the night. It was such a small little town with a pub, a store and not much more. We went to there pub for dinner which was so American cowboy/western style.
We had our included breakfast with our accommodation which is AWESOME and headed towards Cortez to see if we could make it for the night. On the way we drove through the Million Dollar highway up in the mountains that were as high as 10,000ft.
The Million Dollar highway has the most AMAZING views of snow, valleys, animals and just GORGEOUS scenery. Every corner/bend we went around it was another breathtaking view that we would tell each other "WOW look at that, it’s so beautiful!" (Candice needed to go to the toilet and there were porter loos at 10,900ft, hence the photo)
We then stopped in at Mesa Verde National Park. We had only heard about this place from picture we had seen in the Shoe Museum in Canada. (See girls shoes do come in handy!!!)
We entered the park for $10us and it was 15miles to the visitor centre. We had some food in the back of the car so we pulled up at a really nice viewpoint overlooking canyons valley and had some food.
The view was amazing and the weather gods were putting on an awesome day once again. We got to the visitor centre and booked a tour to Castle Palace which cost us $3. Castle palace is just one of the remains of where Ancestral Pueblo people used to live. They made houses out of mud and wood that they collected around the area. The most amazing thing of all is that some of these places have been set into a cliff and some of them are SO high. It’s a very spiritual place and they have these little huts called Kivas that were ´spiritual rooms´. We got to go down into one and see how they made them. They are totally disguised if it wasn’t for the ladder coming out of the top of it.
We drove around the whole park looking at the canyons and where else the Ancestral Pueblo people had built there small villages.
