Colorado Vacation – Day 5

Day 5:

• Left camp around 8:00am
• Gas stop in Golden (14.9 mpg)
• Visited Georgetown
• Visited Silverthorne and Dillon for lunch and to let Evan play in the Park
• Went to Keystone
• Visited Breckenridge and explored the river walk
• Took Boreas pass to Como and back to Denver
• Dinner at Johnny Rocket’s
• Swimming at the campground

We get an early start this morning and headed west. After a gas stop (and discovering that my credit card was discontinued yesterday…) we headed west on I-70. Our first stop was in Georgetown, a small mining town. Dusty and Evan explored the shops downtown while I looked for a wifi connection so I could turn in some work that my boss was expecting. After that we found the road that lead up to Saxon Mountain, which we found in a 4×4 roads book. The road was listed as “easy”, but after seeing the around the first bend in the road, we turned back. It would have been fun, but the road was mostly composed of loose boulders and there was a reasonably high possibility of breaking something.

We headed west again to Dillon and Silverthorne, where we grabbed lunch at the park and let Evan run off some steam. Based on the advice of the guy at the visitor information center, we drove to Keystone to take a gondola ride. Unfortunately, they only run the ride during the evenings, so we were out of luck. Instead we headed over to Breckenridge and wandered around the river walk there. Blue River runs through town, and we took some pictures there. Evan got to see a dog fetching a stick out of the water, and that was a big hit. Afterwards Evan played on the slide in the plaza until he got bored of it.

We took the long way back to Denver, taking Boreas pass down to Como. Boreas pass was described to me as a 4×4 road by the guy at the visitor’s center, but that’s only true if a Mazda Protégé is a 4×4. It was a dirt road that got a little rough at times, but nothing a car couldn’t handle. There were a few short side roads that provided a few challenges, and a few that were more suited to a Jeep. The views were nice from the road, which took us over the pass and down into a bunch of farmland before ending up at 285 near Como.

Finally, we drove back to Denver, had dinner, and took Evan to the pool. We didn’t break anything today, for once, but we did discover our towels (and the camper, and the truck) had been irrigated by the sprinkler system here at the campground. Everywhere we’ve been people have been obsessive about the grass, and there are signs everywhere telling you to stay off, since it’s apparently hard to grow grass at altitude. Why they don’t just put down some gravel is beyond me – there’s no shortage of rock out here.

More stuff we saw:

• a Hi-Lo fifth wheel in Georgetown
• a bus load of barefoot guitar-playing young hippies taking advantage of the free coffee at the visitor’s center in Georgetown.
• Evan got to meet a small dog, and instead of calling it a kitty (like he calls every animal), he called it a “doggie” and said “bow wow wow” to it
• a truck pulling a large fifth wheel with a trailer behind it, loaded with three 4-wheelers
• a brave soul pulling a loaded 6×12 foot Uhaul trailer over a mountain pass with a Pontiac minivan
• extra-tall fire hydrants