It’s our last night in Colorado. Tomorrow we head to El Prado, New Mexico just outside of Taos for two nights and then on to Sante Fe for four days. Our time in Colorado was spent hiking and climbing over big rocks, walking through downtown Denver, Boulder, and Old Colorado City, and driving by the Waldorf schools in the area. We finally purchased a large map of the United States so that we could show the kids what states we are traveling through. The kids then promptly starting drawing their own maps of the United  States.

While in Denver, we visited the Clyfford Still museum. The kids and I enjoyed the museum’s creative space where we got to make our own art. Zoey expressed her hope that we can have a room filled with art materials like this one in our future home.

Friday afternoon after getting settled at our RV park in Colorado Springs, we got some BBQ from Rudy’s (apparently Rudy’s is in Texas, too!) which was Stephen-approved and we headed to the Garden of the Gods park for a late hike and picnic dinner. We drove all around the park along with a hundred other cars and couldn’t find parking except in the overflow lot. We ended up skipping the hike, having a picnic dinner on the grass by the parking lot until it started raining on us. It’s been pretty awesome experiencing the thunderstorms here and  the summer rain which is not something we’re used to.

The next day we went back to the Garden of the Gods park and hiked the Siamese twins trail.

After the hike and lunch, we visited the Rock Ledge Ranch,  which the kids loved. It’s a living history museum with various houses and buildings to tour from the 1860s to 1907 with guides dressed from the appropriate time period sharing their knowledge of the land, the buildings, and the people who lived there.

Today we visited the Manitou Springs Cliff Dwellings that were moved from Mesa Verde and Dolores, Colorado. You can read about how the dwellings were relocated from McElmo Canyon here. As much as we liked Colorado, there was so much traffic on the highways, I thought I was back in LA. We continue our journey to New Mexico as many students return to school this week, we still have three more weeks of vacation before I begin homeschooling.