We bade a rapid farewell to Dawn and Alan when they dropped us off at the Houston Hobby Airport to catch our Southwest flight up to Denver. Southwest is good because they have 2 check-in bags free per customer, all other flights except Jetblue (1 per customer) make you pay around US$25 per first checked bag and $50 or more for any others. As you can imagine this tends to make what was a cheap flight into an expensive one. So internally here you have to watch all the rules, some flights are now introducing fees for carry-on baggage as well!
At Denver we got to ride on the airport train that takes you from your landing terminal to the main one, this airport is huge. Elaine picked us up after we had retrieved our packs and another bag that Dawn has given us. Our packs are starting to fall apart so we have decided that for the rest of our trip we will have one pack and one duffel type bag. The tent and other pack we will leave at Elaines. It is almost exactly 18 months since we left Denver to head south into Mexico. We headed straight out to Fort Collins which is about an hour north of Denver and unloaded ourselves into one of Elaines bedrooms ready for a relaxed and lazy time here.
Elaine's son Grant and wife Carolina and 2 1/2 year old cutey daughter Penelope live in the house too so always something going on. Elaine has two bunnies so we altered a bird aviary she had bought to make a cool bunny mansion for them. A couple of times we went down to Denver and met up with Elaines other kids and had a day in the park and dinner out, lots of fun. We were hoping we would get to see snow but the weather was almost perfect all the time we were there which was also wonderful.
Next stop is Post Falls, Idaho where we are visiting our friend Gary who travelled with us in Central America.
