The Journey Home

It was an awesome vacation! I had an absolute blast, but unfortunately all vacations come to an end so here's the journey back to Michigan. Below is the outside of the Denver Airport, kind of looks like a bunch of tee pees chillin' in the middle of Colorado.

 I didn't fly Southwest, but that was the plane that was hanging out next to ours.

 I want a circle farm!

Sunset on the plane.

She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain

I found out that tours of the Mint were free and the last time I was in Washington D.C. they weren't doing them due to heightened security so I took advantage and signed us up for a tour. It was rather short, probably about half an hour, but it was still pretty cool to see the money being made and know the process of how it works. Our tour guide was a little cheesy, which cracked me up. At the beginning of the tour he said, "The Mint. The only place where the government actually makes "cents"." HAHAHAHA I thought it was great :) The only downfall to the Mint tour was the amount of security rules you had to follow. You weren't allowed to bring a purse or any sort of bag and no camera's so that's why the only pictures I have are of the outside of the building. Still pretty cool either way.

We didn't get to the Red Rock Amphitheater the day before because they had a concert going on and it would have been impossible to get up there, so we went back up again the next day. I'm SO glad we did because it was absolutely gorgeous as you can see from the pictures. You could see all of downtown Denver from way up there. I think the coolest part was that you could see the different layers of earth in each of the protruding rock sheets. Pretty much like going back in time.

 Left: This is one of the HUGE rocks at the entrance to the amphitheater.

Right: I know the left one doesn't look that big, but here's a picture of Jen in front of the rock and you can see that you obviously can't see the top and it's HUGE!!

Taken with my 75-300mm lens, zoomed all the way to 300mm from atop the Red Rocks. 

It was quite a trek just to get down to the amphitheater, but when we did there were TONS of people exercising by running UP the seats or the stairs. There was one guy, probably in his early 50's who did it twice while we were there!! It was crazy. 

There were tons of deer all around, but they're called Mule Deer, obviously because they look like mules. But they have the biggest, cutest deer ears I've ever seen. There's a great picture a few down of a close up of one of them.

Yay for long exposures!! That's Denver in the background. I didn't quite realize how big Denver was until we sat up in the mountains at night starring at it. 

This was a new restaurant that opened up recently in Denver and I HAD to stop and take a picture because it cracked me up so much. I really, REALLY want a shirt from there. It makes me wonder what kind of food that they serve there...

Diggin' with the Dinos

Day two was Dino Day, we headed up to Dinosaur Ridge in the mountains and took a tour of the ridge, which was by far the best $4 tour I've ever taken! The tour guide was rather cute (and an archaeology major) and there was a biker couple on the tour that knew quite a bit about geology and archaeology so TJ (the tour guide) went further into detail than he probably normally would. Our half an hour tour turned into 45 minutes because of the in depth discussions, but it was pretty cool to listen to. We got to see all kinds of dinosaur fossils, dino tracks and a RATTLESNAKE!! It was pretty sweet. The snake was a baby, it was SO cute!

Dinosaur track. The one on the left is the baby Iguanodon and it's about the size of an adult human hand. The one on the right is the adult Iguanodon, a hand can fit in one of its toes!!

Our cute tour guide, TJ. See his "I <3 Dino" shirt?!

Left: A Stegosaurus rib bone

Right: A jawbone, the circle in the middle is a cross-section of a tooth.

The indentation in the layers is where a Brontosaurus stepped lots of years ago. TJ said that, that part of Colorado used to be a flat river way back in the day, so this dinosaur was most likely walking through soft mud near the river bank. But as you can tell, it was super heavy because of all the layers beneath it that it disturbed. Also, where that flat spot is on the bottom of the foot print is practically a cast of a Brontosaurus foot. How sweet is that?! More dino tracks below.

Left: Random cute cactus I found.

Right: There's a fault line that runs right next to the mountains. You can see where it zigzags in the background. Obviously by the photo it's called the Golden Fault.

The baby rattlesnake I found.

Panoramic of the Red Rocks. Another photo of the Red Rocks below.

A view of downtown Denver from the expressway.

After we got some dinner, we headed out to go putt putting at this place called Putter's Pride. This place was giant! It was only $7 and there were three different courses that you could pick from or you could pay $10 and do all three. But we wanted to go play Geeks that Drink later so we only did one of the courses. I still sucked at it, but had a ton of fun! Jen's roommate Annie, came with us and kicked our butt in the beginning, but in the end Jen beat us all!! We chilled with Nessie, as you can see below and even made a little bunny friend.

Jen was awesome and got a hole in 1!!

After putt putt was all done we went to this place called Jonesy's because it's my last name, and played trivia. I was terrible...even the round about candy, I barely knew any answers, but it was still fun. The place was kind of expensive and the food wasn't the greatest. I wouldn't recommend going there, but the Geeks that Drink was fun and are held at other places so I'd check those out.