Manitou Springs: We Are - Moving On

Our time in Manitou Springs/Colorado Springs area of Colorado is coming to a close, and it feels like it's all too soon for us to be leaving. This area has so much to offer and I know we've only scratched the surface. Colorado itself is huge and even if you ignore the plains (sorry plains lovers) and concentrate on the portion that is covered by the Rocky Mountains, you still have an impossible task ahead of you. You can, and many people do, spend a lifetime exploring this extremely rugged, mountainous state.

Tomorrow we say goodbye to the Garden of the Gods Campground and move a little further North, and closer to Denver. We will still be in the Front Range of the Rockies however I don't know the exact elevation of the new campground.

It is owned and operated by Coast-To-Coast RV Resorts. They are giving us two nights free at the campground in exchange for sitting through a 90 minute presentation on why we should buy a membership. Sort of like a condo timeshare except these are camp sites available for your use as you travel. We'll know more tomorrow, I'm sure, after we arrive at the new campground.

I'm trying to keep an open mind since the timeshares we've looked at previously never really appealed to us. I know some people have them and love the flexibility however it never seemed to fit our family and how we vacationed.

This may be different. One of the most important considerations when looking at a campground membership program is where the campgrounds are located. If they are not close to where you like to travel, it does not matter how nice the facilities are or how reasonable the cost.

MLA is still under the weather so we spent the day reorganizing the inside of the RV , eliminating items we are not using and/or can't justify carrying around and paying the 'fuel tax'. It's a constant struggle to avoid accumulating 'stuff'. You have to manage the weight of the RV carefully and it's easy to think that just because you have space available to store something you have the weight capacity to take it along.

Even if you are well within your weight limits, you still want to manage your 'stuff' carefully since you pay a 'fuel tax' on every item and diesel on this trip has ranged from $4.30 to $4.80 per gallon. Usually closer to the higher number than the low number. Everything in the RV contributes to the overall weight and each item is responsible for some portion of the fuel consumption.

Now that we are travelling in the West, the distance between sights we want to see is much greater than back east. Beautiful country however there is a lot of it. One thing for sure, our fuel budget will be stretched to the limit as the distances out here are measured in vast, and more vast.

Our current plan is to go to the Loveland/Ft Collins/Estes Park area of Colorado next week. The following week will be in South Dakota's Bad Lands National Park & Mt. Rushmore and then over to Devil's Tower, Wyoming.

Devil's Tower is a 1260 foot monolith made famous in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" with Richard Dreyfus. There's a great scene in the movie when he builds a model of something he has seen in his dream out of mashed potatoes. You guessed it, it was Devil's Tower in Wyoming.

The following week we will head over to Yellowstone National Park. We will probably spend the week before and maybe the week after the Labor Day weekend in Yellowstone. We've been told that if you are in Yellowstone during September you can count on having it snow 3 or 4 times that month, so we'll be playing it by ear.

Part of today's reorganizing was to make sure our cold weather gear was close at hand. Mind you, my cold weather gear is a wind breaker and some long sleeved shirts. If I wake up and need more clothing than that we'll fire up the RV and drive South until we find warm weather again.

After Yellowstone I'm not sure where we will head next. Maybe to Boise ID to see some friend or to Grand Teton National Park, which is just South of Yellowstone. I'm pretty sure we will not be able to explore the northern reaches of Montana and Idaho this year as I had hoped. Oh well, I guess we will have to come back and explore more of the West next spring and summer.

See Ya!