We are now in Teton National Park, and we must say the mountains are spectacular.

 

 

After the Colorado Springs campground, with all amenities (incl some highway noise) we drove to Chatwick State Park – just before Denver. The plan was to stay there for two nights when we looked at Denver, but the weekend was all booked and we could only get one night. Anyway, we got another shower.

 

Denver is a nice, buzzing city, with a new 16^th street mall and a historical Larimer Square (which is a street), but we ended up spending more time in The Golden Triangle, just south of down town. Here we also got some very nice Cuban dinner (who said local food?) .

 

That evening we tried WalMart camping. When we came to a WalMart (Miss Garmin can help us with this kind of  priceless information) there were no other campers, so we decided to try another one slightly more out of town. There were also none, but it was a bit quieter and we asked the guard – and naturally we could stay there. That night it was warm and I cannot say we slept well, but that was not WalMarts fault.

 

The day we skipped in Colorado Springs we now spent in Boulder. Boulder is a university town just at the edge of the Rocky Mountains and they have a really nice, and very european, “pedestrian zone” (or mall). It was farmers marked day, so we were just hanging out during the day.

 

Felix was now pretty much over his cold, but Sabine had caught it. After dinner we, stupidly for a Saturday evening, decided to drive to the entry of the Rocky Mountain National Park to find a place to sleep. Everything was booked, big surprise.

 

After a few tries, and some discouraging messages, we found a campground who didn’t mind to take us in their overflow spots on the parking lot. Worked for us and we got a shower that day as well and we could check emails (though sending mails was blocked!).

 

Now into the park – it is really a nice park, but day one we just hung around as Sabine really didn’t feel well. Day two Sabine was better and we took a short hike to Dream Lake. Day three we wanted to drive to the west exit, over the mountains, and stay at the campground there, but due to a bark beetle infestation it now only had 17 sites available. Sabine was mostly over the cold but I had a sore throat, next in line

 

We drove anyway and the view from the Alpine areas (3700 m / 12,300 ft) was really amazing. On the way over the mountains we also got a hailstorm with rather large bits of ice! It was so much, we almost got concerned about dents in the bus.

 

 

Safely over the mountains we decided to get a head start on the fairly long drive to the Tetons the next day. We drove to a BLM campground called Dugout. This one was pretty nice, but like all BLM campground it had only a pit toilet. (Miss Garmin was the one telling us about the place – without it we probably would not have found it).

 

From here the drive to Tetons National Park was not so long and we had nice trip. The bus seems to have had a problem with the gasket (Dansk: Pakning / Deutsch: Dichtung) as we have not had to fill coolant on the car since the change in Black Canyon. Granted it has not been as warm as it was in California/Arizona, but the mountains have been quite a bit higher.