Day 1, Rocky Mountains

Hello all!

Can't believe that earlier this morning I was helping Dad spray poison on bugs. But, such is life.

So far, the trip has gone great. The drive to Nashville went well. Our flight to Denver was on time (in fact, it was a little early). We got all of our bags at Baggage Claim. The van that we rented turned out to be a 2011 Town & Country with leather interior and satellite radio.

And, get this....when we checked into our hotel (Residence Inn), she had upgraded us to the "Penthouse Suite" and when she rang it up, it came up $10 cheaper than the "regular room" I had booked. Now, don't get too excited. Y'all were probably thinking about the suite that the family had at the end of Home Alone 2. No....it is nothing like that. But, it does have two bedrooms, two baths, etc. All in all, not too bad.

The only bad thing that happened was we made one wrong turn. We were trying to drive into an area of Denver that had a really nice Super Target, a bunch of nice restaurants, etc. You get the idea. Well, we couldn't figure out how to get off the Interstate and get there. We ended up in Commerce City. That ended up being a nightmare. We stopped off at a Wendy's and it took them three times to get my sandwich right. (It was a Single with ketchup only. I guess my simplicity confused them.) Then, we went by a Wal-Mart Supercenter to purchase a cooler and food for the trip. The store was completely trashed. (We were now concluding that Commerce City is not a "good" part of town.) We found our items and then ran into another obstacle: severe mismanagement. There were only about 4 lanes open and each lane had at least 10 people waiting. It took us over 30 minutes to check out. But, the end of the story is that we have our food and we are ready to go.

Tomorrow we are heading for Rocky Mountain National Park and then spend tomorrow night in Cheyenne, Wyoming. There is a pretty good chance of rain tomorrow (about 60%), so I'm hoping that we might get some breaks in the rain when we in the mountains.

That's it for now!

Barry