Friday already?  Day starts like any other.  Continental breakfast.  Pastries.  Waffle.  There were actually two girls finishing breakfast as I came in.  They started talking to me and told me they were from Kansas City.  When they found out I was from Maryland, their first reaction was “Wow, and we thought we were road tripping!”

Here we are driving through Kansas…and driving through Kansas…and continuing to pass dead corn and wheat fields in Kansas.  One interesting thing was, as we were gaining time with the changing timezones, we were also gaining speed.  You can drive 65 in Maryland, 70 in Kansas and 75 in Colorado.  I had gotten so used to driving faster in Colorado that I was having to restrain myself in the flat, endless stretch of I-70 that bisects Kansas.  I see a white car zooming up the left side, so I wait to let him pass.  Then the car gets behind me and lights start flying.  …great, just great.

State trooper gets out and talks to me…tells me I’m doing 80 in a 70.  After a minute, he asks me to get out and sit in his car with him.  He asks me a bunch of questions about where I have been, what my parents do, etc.  Then he gets out and asks my dad the same questions to see if they match up.  He lets me go with a warning and I thank him.  Dad and I stop at a gas station later and find out that cops are pulling anyone with out of state plates over if they have a reason to because there has been drug trafficking across states.  That explains why he was inspecting my car as he walked up.  I’m sure my shaggy hair didn’t help my cause initially, haha.

My dad took over driving for a little bit and we stopped at that gas station in Bunker Hill.  I bought one toy air-pressured pop cork gun on the way up and decided I wanted to buy another one so that I could have a duel like they did in this Disney Christmas short I watched all the time as a kid.  The kids get up after Santa visits and two of them had these wind up cork guns that they shot at each other and wound up again.  Ever since then I had wanted two guns like that…and I found them!  Dad took more pictures of Bunker Hill and then we got Sonic for lunch, my dad’s first Sonic experience.  We capped it off with ice cream of course.  Dad got his traditional ice cream sundae and I got a caramel milkshake (something I had never tried before, per usual).

After lunch, we finish our drive to Boonville, Missouri.  I get out and go in to pay.  The woman behind the desk tells me they have to charge my card debit because it’ll charge my card twice if they run credit or some bizarre reasoning like that.  Regardless, the weirdness of it was topped when they told us that the shuttle was coming in 15 minutes to go to the casino.  I did my research and knew about the casino and the buffet discounted on Saturdays in October and November, but I was not going to be stranded at a casino.

Dad and I drove over to the Isle of Capri, whch is literally less than a block from a residential community.  Dad and I ate really great tasting cheesesteaks and fries at the restaurant in the building, which looked like a converted school or grocery store.  While I was on the phone with my friend April, my dad went off to play the piano at the front of the sit down restaurant.  Dad played the piano to the amusement of all the waiters and gave me 150 dollars to go gamble with.  This cute, 25 year old dealer was trying to entice me to play solo at a $10 table.  As cute as she was, I was not going to play a $10 table with only $150.

I scoped out a couple other tables and saw a $5 on the upswing.  The first walk by, I saw 6 and 7s and then the higher cards started coming so I sat down with my $150 and did not lose a single hand.  I pushed once.  When I got up $85, the female dealer who was so much fun (considering the hands she was dealing) clocked out and this new dealer clocked in as the shoe needed reshuffling.  He shuffles the shoe and then checks out for a third dealer.  I had $25 out on the felt, played one hand with the new dealer, won it and left.  That was fishy, and I was going to leave on top.  After seeing one man bust and put out more money and hearing two others talk about losing 200 and 300 dollars, I got up and left, feeling quite satisfied winning $110.  My dad was thrilled, and I left the table just as he had to stop playing the piano.  Timing was perfect.  Went back to the room and went to bed.  Fun, but weird day in Boonville.  I’ve seen it once and, though it was fun, that’s all I need.

Tis Thursday!  Continental breakfast again.  Waffle from the waffle iron, again.  Huge fluffy brown and white dog on a leash with a woman checking out.  Hadn’t seen the last one yet.  I guess La Quinta allows pets, huh?

Pueblo is about a half hour from Canon City where the Royal Gorge and Bridge is located—the largest suspension bridge in the US that you are allowed to both walk and drive across!  Of course my dad hears this and gets excited, so he looks to see what else they have there.  That’s when he finds the zipline, tells me about it and then regrets telling me about it once he hears how adamant I am about doing the zipline.  We get to the gorge and find out that the zipline is closed for the day.  Apparently some 4,000 people can show up on any given day during the summer.  There were maybe 8 in the park this day.

We take a sky car attached to a rope line across the gorge and get an absolutely stunning mid-air view.  When we get to the other side, we take even more pictures and wander down a trail where we see 4 buffalo, including a huge white buffalo 20 feet away through a fence.  I took pictures, took video and then moved on to see a bunch of horned sheep and a ram, getting even more amazing pictures.  After spending an extended amount of time taking pictures that I’d never get the opportunity to take again, dad and I wander through an old west town with a saloon, work area and, of course, the jail.  I made sure to take a couple pictures at lest of both my dad and me each in jail.

After breaking out of prison, we walked across the bridge and then took a 6 car train-type vehicle down into the bottom of the gorge right next to the Arkansas River.  Going back up the train, we made sure to stand in the front car so we could see the entire ascent to the side of the gorge.  Before leaving Royal Gorge, I drove the 10 mph speed limit across the bridge and then stopped at a gas station/souvenir shop to get 2 Colorado shirts for buy 1 get 1 before taking a scenic route along 115 to Garden of the Gods park in Colorado Springs.

We drove into Garden of the Gods and after the first lookout point, we decided to walk a little bit of a trail.  Not long into our walk we came across an old man sitting on a bench just staring at one of the groups of red rocks.  He had lived there for 25 years and said that he loved the place.  He even showed us the Indian chief in the rock that we were looking at and then showed us the kissing camels in the rock we were looking at previously.  Dad and I had a picture taken of us holding up the Balancing Rock and then we just enjoyed the scenic beauty of the free-of-charge park.

My dad’s camera winds up dying on him, so we go into the gift shop and he asks the people working over at the food station if he could plug his camera charger in for a bit.  I wandered around, found some neat wood-carved personalized pens, but decided to get this cute pullback toy plane that zips along the ground and found a little bottle with 24-karat gold flakes floating in it for my dad, who has been collecting gold related trinkets since a family beach trip a couple years ago.  It has a bear on the top and he loves it, of course.

We stopped at an outlook as the sun was setting and got pictures of the view and of Pike’s Peak before driving out the way we came in.  We stopped at that same Denny’s again.  There were two clumps of snow in the parking lot!  The manager was working and she told us the snow was so hard it was blowing sideways.  Dad and I each got chicken-fried steak and I ordered this blue banana flavored drink that is made with sprite.  After dinner and my dad’s expecting gabbing we continued on our few hour drive to Goodland, Kansas, which is still in mountain time, but my phone had switched to central.  Goodland is about 15 miles from the line.  Gaining time was a great perk going towards Colorado, but I had a feeling it was going to make for exhausting days going back.  Regardless, I have absolutely no regrets because this roadtrip that I was able to drive out to Colorado was absolutely, 100% worth it…and it isn’t over yet!

We wake up on Wednesday feeling really good.  Me, finally able to release the traveling junkie inside of me, made sure to write down all the places in Boulder that I had seen on Travel Channel to go try while in Colorado.  After waking up and taking a few pictures of the mountain out the window again, we go to The Buff for breakfast.

Oh my goodness, saddlebag pancakes are beyond delicious.  The fact that they come with two eggs just tops off the entire meal in style.  What are saddlebag pancakes you may ask?  Order your favorite breakfast meat—sausage, bacon, ham—and they cook it into your pancakes.  I couldn’t decide between the sausage or the bacon and decided to go with sausage because that’s what I usually used to have my pancakes with growing up.  When the waitress brings the food to the table, she realizes that I have one with sausage and one with bacon.  She apologizes and told me she will take it back, and I calmly tell her not to worry about it that it is fine…in fact, it’s better than fine, it is exactly what I wanted!  The food gods knew...  And yes, the bacon one was delicious too.  Get the sausage and you will not be disappointed. 

After breakfast, Dad and I went to Pearl Street Mall, which is an outdoor mall with a bunch of shops lining the streets, very similar to the shopping strip next to where I currently work.  I bought little wind up toys (a robot that did the splits, a worm that wiggled and a dog that did flips), a souvenir frisbee and a light up spinner.  My dad bought a giant marble and a couple wooden spinning tops.  After leaving the store, this woman approaches us with her friend, asks to buy a cigarette off my dad and then asks if we want to go smoke a bowl.  With that, we left to go to Estes Park.

The elevation to get up to Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Park is pretty extreme.  There are steep, windy inclinations and just getting to Longmont, halfway to Estes.  We stopped at a gas station, met the cashier who lives in Longmont and he has never even gone up to Estes.  My dad was getting cloudy in the head and was feeling weak.  I was getting a slight headache and was feeling unbalanced a bit.  After driving a little more, we talked and decided to drive down and enjoy the rest of our day.  We had driven into the mountains and, even though, we didn’t get all the way to RMNP, we were happy with what we did get to see.  It was better than getting sick.  Besides, I nearly got myself sick at the next place we went anyway.  Going up any further would not have helped, haha.