It's that time again....Dudley Field Trip 2018

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Since we took a hiatus in 2017 (you know having a baby and all), we are finally back on the road again.  For this years trip we are traveling all around Colorado. 

Daniel left Wednesday to start the drive to Colorado with "Herman" on top of the car.  He had a brief visit in Kansas with Missy, Jenna, and Roy and drove over to Denver on Friday.  Since he has been by himself he has had a few bumps in the road but things are finally starting to look up.  

I decided to take advantage of EG flying as lap child for free and we flew out on Monday from Knoxville to Denver.  I was really nervous about flying alone with her, since the last time we flew I had 7 other people to help me with her.  But we survived it and had some really nice people around us on the plane.  



Once Daniel picked us up from the airport we headed to Colorado Springs.  We had dinner and found our campground for the night.  (My new intention of this blog is to post lodging and food review, but more specifically food reviews.  Some of my food photos are on Daniel's phone, so I'll do a separate post later of food. 


Tuesday morning we got up and after having to run some errands to pick a few food items up for EG and ship some stuff for Daniel we visited Garden of the Gods.  



After Garden of the Gods we walked around Old Colorado City to have lunch and shop some.  The best part is we found a quilt shop ;)



From Colorado Springs we drove on to the Great Sand Dunes we didn't get here in time to do anything in the park on Tuesday but spent all day there today.  We did several short hikes but the best hike today wasn't even in the park it was 3 miles outside of the park to Zapata Falls. It was so cold...I thought my feet were going to freeze...you literally have to hike through the creek to see the falls.  





Since the sand dunes can get up to 140 degrees during the day we went back to do that tonight after dinner.  It was wild to see all the sand just right there at the base of the mountain.  Usually there is a creek that runs at the base of the dunes but due to a low snow year in the mountains there hasn't been any run off and the creek has dried up.  The wind is really bad on the dunes and the sand stings as it hits you.  We did't not hike far up....the highest dune is 750 ft up and takes about an 1.5 hours to get to the top (I saw lots of people up there today) but the sand is really hard to walk in. Overall I would say Sand Dunes is an okay park.  Not the best I've ever been too, but really neat to see.

Trails Hiked:
Sand Sheet .5 miles
Montville Nature Trail .5 miles
Wellington Ditch 1 mile
Zapata Falls 1 miles




Tomorrow on to Mesa Verda National Park. 

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