Colorado, Here We Come!

This is how Justin and I spent the 8 days following our wedding: 5 days honeymooning in Cancun, 1 day in Katy packing up and saying goodbye to family, 1 day making the 1,049-mile drive from Katy, Texas to Denver, Colorado, and 1 day moving into our new apartment. Monday morning (day 9) Justin began his new job.














A quick photo tour of our apartment: Living room
Bedroom
Dining Room







Last weekend Justin and I went camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. As it was our first time camping on our own, we decided to just go for one night and thereby get practice with planning camping trips. On our way there we stopped at REI and got North Face sleeping bags, nalgene water bottles, and hats! So we totally looked like legit campers as we headed out to the park... that is, after we removed all the price tags.

The park was beautiful!!!
We saw lots of wildlife, including elk, marmots, ducks, bunnies, and chipmunks!
On Friday afternoon after setting up our tent, we went for a short hike (2.3 miles each way) to a small lake. That was really fun, and would have been more fun if it hadn't started to rain as we got close to the turn-around point. Saturday we went for a slightly longer hike (3 miles each way, with a 1,000-ft elevation gain) to the top of a mountain. That was also fun, and the view was BEAUTIFUL. As we sat at the top, eating lunch and shooing away chipmunks, we saw (and heard) threatening thunder clouds approaching, and it got pretty cold. So we packed up, making sure we didn't have any chipmunk stow-aways, and headed expeditiously back down the mountain so as not to get rained on. A short way into our descent we started to feel wet drops on our skin... cold wet drops. Soon the frequency of these drops increased, and we heard them falling on the ground also. I looked at the ground around me and was astounded to find that rather than simple wet spots, there were little white spots on the ground! I turned to Justin, who had just had the same realization, as we both said "it's snowing!!!" This was very exciting for us, and we would have enjoyed it more if we hadn't both been wearing shorts and t-shirts. We hurried down the mountain as quickly as we could, so we didn't have time for photos. But we weren't quite quick enough to escape getting snow, which soon melted into cold dirty water, inside our sneakers. Bleh!

Here are a few photos from our hiking. We have so many, it's hard to choose which ones to post, but this blog takes so long to upload each photo that I will only post a few. There are more on my Facebook page.