Woodland Park with The Faerber's

We LOVE discovering new, cool places in Colorado, and Woodland Park is one cool town!!!  It's just 30 mins West of Colorado Springs, in the Pike National Forest.  Gorgeous and just the right size (which means plenty to do, but not a big city)!  Add to that, decent prices, great weather, a dinosaur museum, farmers market, and cheap bars and we were in heaven!  We would have loved being here under any circumstances, but making things 1000X better was the fact that our friends, Chelsea and James and their sons, Tobin (3) and Quay (1) lived there for the summer (another traveling family of sorts)!!!  They let us park our RV in their driveway and we were "neighbors" for a week.  The kind of neighbors that mess up your house all day, while your husband works in the RV and ask if they can use your shower. 

Standing in Tobin's front yard

Tobin is one of Loralai's best friends and they can play together for hours.  Juliet loved trying to play with Quay, but in fact scaring him and making him cry.  We spent a lot of the our time just letting the kids be together at the house.  I had some real estate deals to work on anyways and was able to catch up a little on the blog too.  Chelsea had some work and canning to do, so it worked out that the kids kept each other busy.

CAN!

Highlights of our time here included...

Florissant National Monument
This is a cool place about 30 mins from Woodland Park that is a monument mainly due to petrified redwood tree stumps that were found there.  They also focus on all fossils in general.  We did a little hike and looked at the stumps and fossils and got Loralai's final Jr Ranger Badge of the trip!  And Tobin got his First!



At this point in the trip, Juliet got very into "Ring Around the Rosies" and everyone around her had to do it alot.  She calls it "Pocket" (Pocket full of Posies).  So if you even mention the word Pocket, she will MAKE you do the song and circle.

Tobin and Loralai running the trails.


We made a day of our outing and took the kids to a nearby playground to run and eat lunch after we left. 

This was posted on the fence at the playground.  Hahahaha...

 



Date Night
Chelsea has some great ideas!  One of which was to take turns watching each others kids, so we could each go on a date night.  Yes, and thank you!  Joe and I went to a sushi restaurant and it was GREAT!!!  Yay for dates!  Something that was a rarity on our adventure.

Farmers Market
Woodland Park has by far, the best Farmer's Market I have ever been too!  And it takes place EVERY Friday!  I took our crappy stroller and the girls and we racked up!!!  Everything from slushies to grain fed rack of lamb!  I bought way more produce than we could eat and then left half of it with Chelsea when we left.  But it was fun!!!

Alpaca's

Have to stop to climb this big rock, of course!

Climbing Pike's Peak
Check that one off the bucket list!  I CLIMBED A MOUNTAIN!!!!  It was awesome, and terrible, and great, and hard, but not as hard as I thought it would be and TOTALLY worth it!  It's kind of a big deal that I did this, so prepare to be bombarded with photos!  They also help tell the story.  My dear friend, Chelsea, is and outdoor expert!  She and her husband own and operate Outdoor Wilderness Adventures (OWA), which is why they were living in Woodland Park for the summer.  She's done all kinds of amazing things, but since having her 2 boys, hasn't done anything super outdoorsie.  So she told me we were going to climb Pikes Peak while I was there.  "Um, OK.", was my response.  Well, she meant it.  We picked our day, Joe took off to watch the girls, and we left for the trail head by 5am.  EARLY!  Here is our story...with LOTS of pics!

After almost leaving our (old lady) hiking poles in the car, we started our hike UP the mountain.  We were so full of energy and excitement here.  Plus we had just peed on some rocks, so we were feeling pretty good!

This is what I looked at for most of our hike....The back of Chelsea, that's when I could even see her.

Two pretty girls checking us out.  There were actually a TON of women doing this hike to our surprise!  They way out numbered the amount of men we saw!



The views were breath-taking and probably the BEST I'd see on the entire trip!



A few snickers bars and coconut water and we're still going strong!



At this point we had done hours of what I consider to be "serious uphill hiking" and Chelsea turns to me and says, "Look, we're almost there!"  She was referring to the top of the mountain way off in the distance that I'm pointing to.  Somehow I was NOT comforted by how "close" we were!

Happy Chelsea! 
Honestly to her credit, she was trying not to be TOO happy, as to not piss my tired ass off too much at this point.

Our hike did start out very wooded, but the last 3/4 of it was above the tree-line and very exposed.  The trail also followed close to the road, which went to the top, for most of the hike.  It might have crossed my mind to just catch a ride up more than a few times.



The last leg of our hike was over this!  There was NO trail.  Chelsea called it "rock hopping" or something like that.  I did admit that is was kind of fun picking my path as I hopped UP the rocks, AFTER it was over.



We MADE it!!! 
5 hours and some minuets and we had climbed from 10,000 feet to over 14,000 feet!



We are Mountain Climbers!!!!



James had predicted it would take us 7 hours to climb to the top.  He had greatly underestimated his wife's pushy, no stopping to rest ass!  So we sat at the gift shop/donut shop and ate terrible donuts and the worst hamburger I've ever had in my life (And I was a teacher who ate school food!), and we LOVED it!

Here's where I would play "We are the Champions of the World" if I knew how to do it!

Climbing Pikes was the best possible way for us to end our trip!  Thank you, Thank you, Thank you Chelsea for recommending we do it, and putting up with slow, grumpy, quiet cause I was trying to breath ME!  I love you and love that we shared this adventure together and love that our kids got to see us do it and our husbands supported us and watched the kids while we did it!