Day 13 (12,095 ft and lightning) July 27, 2009
So today we crossed the continental divide. Well, not so much crossed as “stopped at, walked around for a while, took some pictures, then carried on”. We also happened to be at 12,075 feet at that point (3,680 meters for you Canadian folk) so walking around was a little more strenuous than at the 150 or so feet (50 meters for you Canadian folk) we’re used to being above sea level.
In any case, I’m getting ahead of myself. Today was our last day in New Castle, CO. We began the day with pictures. However, you heard about that from Keltie’s previous post, so on to the rest of the events from today!
We decided that we’d drive to Colorado Springs via highway 82 which is through Aspen, so that we could say that we’ve actually been through Aspen. Keltie drove the first leg to Aspen, and we took a bit of a break there and poked around. After that, we were on our way to the top! Now, unlike our Canadian highways (and most American highways) the route from Aspen to Twin Lakes is a little crazier. In some places the road narrows and it’s more like a lane and a half rather than two lanes wide, and in other places there aren’t any guard rails because there just wasn’t room to put them anywhere! However, the drive was worth it as the few from the top is breathtaking – probably one of the coolest in America. Like I mentioned previously, we were at an altitude of 12,075 feet, although if you were willing to hike a bit you could probably go up another 1,000 – 1,500 ft to the very top of some of the peaks. We weren’t up to that, though, as the air was thin enough where we were. The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful, although we did stop in Buena Vista, Colorado for some fantastic subs from a local place. Ah yes, and we actually managed to crash our GPS! It’s a Windows CE based machine, so we’ve had to reset it probably once a day. However, today we actually managed to get the mapping program to throw an exception. When I get a chance I’ll see what kind of errors a GPS program throws.
Seeing my parents was great as we haven’t seen them since last fall at my sister’s wedding – we had a great dinner and enjoyed conversation around the table. I was stoked, though, as during dinner a storm had moved in so after dinner a got a chance to do something that’s really rare back home – take pictures of lightning! It takes both a bit of work and a bit of luck, but I think I got some alright ones for a first try – that’s up to you guys, though (=.
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