The morning came early. the expulsion from my body was unrelenting. Eventually I cleaned up the bathroom and threw everything away that was not nailed down. I felt bad for the cleaning crew on this one.
I crawled into car and started the next leg of the journey. I was to do some hiking on the way to Vail. About 20 minutes outside of Boulder I pulled over to the side of the road to puke my life out again.
I came upon the town of Nederland. It seemed like a cool outdoor living town. I was originally going to head north here at hit Lake Isabella. I carried on.
Rolled through Central city above. It was like a mini Vegas. It was just nonstop casinos. The weird thing was that they all looked brand new but the place was deserted. I am surprised I had not heard of this place before. I was in no mood to gamble so I kept truckin'
I skipped all of the hikes planned for that day. You can see the list back on the link to my itinerary from day 1. as I got close to Vail I pulled out my Kayak.com app on my phone. I had learned this trick on a trip through Portland a couple years back. If you search for rooms the night of, you occasional can stumble upon some killer deals.
I found multiple deals and selected the Vail Cascade Resort for $100 seen below
The next morning I vowed to get back on track. I plugged the dam and headed for Glenwood Springs to hit the Hanging Lake Trail.
It was pretty much straight up to a lake. It was not as challenging as the Royal Arch hike the other day but in my weakened state is was tough enough. I had no energy. It felt like i was hiking at 20K ft.
I pretty followed the same formula for Visiting the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. Here is the PDF for that park as well:
Here I had also planned to do some hikes but that was not in the cards. This is a deep canyon that has a pretty grueling trail that drops down off the rim a few thousand feet to the Gunnison river. It is called the Black Canyon because it receives very little sunlight. There is also a road that runs down to a campsite along the river. I decided to bypass sleeping outside tonight and would continue on to Telluride for the night. Before leaving the park, at one of the lookouts, there was a lady walking with her camera videotaping as she got closer to the edge with full narration. I had to withhold my desire to flip her over the rail and make a youtube sensation of her final moments. This trend of videotaping with iphones is a disturbing trend. I was at a baseball game not too long ago and multiple people around me had their arms outstretched videotaping the game. Just watch the fucking game at home! Are you really gunna sit around the iphone later and watch this. Do your coworkers want to see this?
Pulling into Telluride I was able to use the Kayak website to great another great discount at a high end locale. Telluride is a pretty cool spot in the summer. I am not much of a skier, but I thought it was cool how they had the gondolas running and you could take them from village to village and downtown. Each little village where the gondola dropped off had some bars, restaurants and lodges.
When I am feeling better this is a spot I would like to see more of. It was cool that people could load their mountain bikes on the outside of the Gondolas and then freely ride down the mountain.
After grabbing dinner downtown it was back to the cabin for my last night of hell.
Darren