Wonderful Happenings...: A Rocky Mountain Babymoon

Last Thursday began with a buzzing alarm clock at 3:00 a.m. We needed to leave the house by 3:30 to make it to the airport in New Orleans a comfortable 2 hours before our flight left for Denver. It wasn't as difficult to pull ourselves out of bed as we expected, and after an uneventful drive to the airport and flight to Colorado, we found our way through the maze in Denver to retrieve our baggage and rental car by 10:30 a.m. We made it to Boulder, CO before our stomachs could take it no longer and we had to stop for lunch. We also dropped by the local Wal-Mart to pick up the supplies that we didn't have room for on the plane.

Finally, around 3:00 p.m., we found our way to our campsite at Moraine Park Campground in Rocky Mountain National Park. It was a beautiful site - the most secluded in the whole campground - located in the middle of an expansive meadow scattered with ancient ponderosa pines, with views of the mountains in all directions. Three trees stood 50 yards away on hillside, the perfect spot for us to hang our hammocks and gaze at Longs Peak (the highest mountain in the park at 14,259 feet) in the distance. As Justin began setting up the tent, though, all I could think of were the words of the park ranger as we checked in. She strongly encouraged us to keep our food in one of the "bear boxes" located throughout the campground, because there had been bears active in the area all week, and they had been known to break into cars to get to the delectable goodies. I, however, was more worried about a bear breaking into our tent than our car. Luckily, we never did see any bears in our campsite, but we encountered mule deer constantly on our many treks to the bathhouse.

As cozy as our little tent looked in the middle of our big, grassy meadow, our first night turned out to be a bit more restless than we had anticipated. Our thick sleeping bags and sleeping pads that we normally camp in were a bit to bulky to fit in our luggage, so we were left to sleep on our gravelly pad with temperatures dipping into the low 40s in a much-too-thin summertime sleeping bag (it didn't help that I haven't been able to make it through the night without using the restroom in about 5 months). At around 3:30 a.m. that night, I finally asked Justin - who had been tossing and turning for the last couple of hours as well - if he would accompany me to the bath house, since I couldn't possibly go alone (bears, remember?). We decided to drive our rental car the several hundred yards to the bath house, and we immediately realized that the soft seats were much more comfortable than our thin sleeping bags...so, we decided to spend the rest of the night in the car...and each night thereafter! A least our tent did provide a convenient storage facility for all of our gear :)