Sunny Day in the Mountains

 Our first stop once getting into RMNP was to go to our usual picnic area and fill our bellies before doing some exploring. The kids were pretty excited about our picnic area. There were some fallen trees that they could walk across and it would lead to some rocks that they could stand on. 

In the midst of cleaning up our picnic, a lady stopped by us and told us there was some big animals roaming around in the water, if we were interested in going to see. We quickly put the rest of our stuff away and made our way towards the river. I was thinking that we were going to see some elk, but when we got there, I was shockingly surprised that there was a couple moose along the river side. A mom and baby!

We probably stood there and watched them for a good 20 minutes. They were just munching away on the trees and had no idea the amount of people that were gathering around taking pictures of them. 

It was a very cool sight, for sure!! 

A lot of the roads/trails were closed due to the fires in the area. Unfortunately, one of the roads we really wanted to take Amber on while we were in the mountains, was Trail River Road. The upside to not being able to do some of the things we wanted, we got to explore areas that we haven't been to yet. 

We have always talked about wanting to walk along side the river in a certain area, but we never have, so no better time to do so, than now!

So glad we did!! It was beautiful. It may have been very windy, but it's exactly where I needed to be at that moment in time. Just being there in nature, watching the kids play in the water and sand, it's really like you're in a whole different world. It really does clear your head of everything and you can just sit back and relax. 

But, as you see, you can't see the mountains too well in my pictures. That's due to all the smoke that was in the area. So, even when you feel like you can take a deep breathe while you're there, you didn't really want to do that at this moment of time 'cuz you could smell the smoke in the air. 

This picture is smoke coming up from the fires. It was pretty scary watching the cloud of smoke 'cuz it just kept getting bigger and bigger while we were there. 

This was a picture I took while we stopped on the side of the road. It's so sad that the smoke was that bad that you can't even see the mountains. Usually, you feel like you can see forever into the distance, but not this time.

We spent a good time of the afternoon doing some exploring in the Rockies, but we also wanted to get to our cabin for the night, so we could enjoy it a bit since we were only staying one night. The kids were busy exploring the inside and outside of the cabin, while Courtney, Amber and I enjoyed the deck and just sit back and relax while the kids explored the area. 

We did decided to go into downtown Estes Park for some dinner and shopping. This is where we spotted this hummingbird and we actually spotted a few more on our walk through downtown. 

We may have spent a little more time downtown then we thought we would, but Estes is so nice, that you just don't want to leave sometimes. But, it was back to the cabin, got the kids to bed and the adults enjoyed some drinks before heading to bed.