It’s been a while! An entire state actually. I turned 27 last week in Colorado, Denver to be specific. We celebrated with delicious food and cocktails and an early night to prepare me for the rest of old age. I’m kind of joking.

I didn’t take many photos in Denver. We spent a while just walking around town and checked out the excellent toys exhibit at the History Colorado Centre. It’s a look at toys from the 1950s to 1970s and there are amazing retro style lounge rooms with TVs that play old toy advertisements.

Made to look like the inside of the original Barbie dream house

1950s cowboy era

There is also a table where you can play some of the games. I whipped Andrew at Trouble, Jenga and the retro toy quiz. He probably beat me at Slinky racing, but that’s hard to judge.

Prepare to lose!

After Denver we headed to Boulder, where our first stop was a rental place to hire some tubes. Giant inflatable tubes for tubing down white water rapids. The hire company cleverly recommended we attach said tubes to the roof of our car with twine. Twine. After one disastrous attempt we made it to the river, stress over right? Maybe.

I’ll be the first to admit the rapids look tiny.

But trust me, you don’t want to go down them sideways. I didn’t mean to! I was kind of busy filming on my GoPro and didn’t watch where I was going. Next thing I know I’m hitting rocks underwater, just my shoulder thank goodness. Not my head.

Still, back on the horse! I lost my sunnies in the mayhem but Andrew managed to pull them out of the water, not all heroes wear capes.

The offending rapid:

Relaxing with a beer after a stressful afternoon

Meanwhile:

Nice bruise starting to form

You can see the video I was filming as I met my watery fate here.

Other activities in Boulder included taking in the Flat Irons:

Which are flat, like irons.

And visiting Rocky Mountain National Park!

Rocky and mountainous

At 12,000ft peak elevation it was the highest altitude either of us had ever been at. I felt a bit weird but nothing too sinister, hopefully that bodes well for the Inca Trail in Peru in two short months’ time.

We explored the lofty areas of the park, but went down a bit lower to hike. Which was still about 9500ft.

First to Nymph Lake:

Nymphs: 0
Lily pads: a million

Then to Dream Lake:

Dreamy

Then to Emerald Lake:

Then finally back via Bear Lake:

It was really good to hike again after quite a long hiatus. I finally returned my hiking boots which turned out to be far too small, hence the epic pain in my big toes upon descending. The difference was astounding, I found myself practically running downhill. The only catch was they only make mens’ hiking boots large enough to fit my giant feet. So now Andrew and I are twins with the same boots. Awkward!

The drive out of Colorado was kind of hairy. We drove on the i70 though the mountains and an accident on the other side of the highway caused total chaos for traffic going the other way, I felt so sorry for the bored people sitting on their cars during the total standstill. There are pretty much no shoulders on this road so accidents and break downs just sit there in the path of oncoming traffic. As such we had to slam the brakes on hard for a car with a blow out in our lane. Kind of scary.

Still we made it back to Utah, which I may have been kind of excited about.