We took a 4 day fall break trip to Colorado and it was absolutely beautiful! Fall is by far my favorite time of year, and this trip did not disappoint!
Getting to Colorado:
We flew direct from CVG-DEN on Frontier. We have found the cheapest flights have been on Frontier and Southwest to Denver, and you can’t beat nonstop! When we arrived, we grabbed our rental car from Enterprise. Rental car tip- book through Costco travel! We found the Costco membership every year is worth it with the discounts on booking our rental cars + save on fuel while traveling! After we had our car, we headed to Colorado Springs.
Colorado Springs:
When we first arrived, we went to our hotel to drop off our stuff and change. We stayed at a Hilton near the Air Force Academy. After that we hopped in the car and headed to Garden of the Gods. It’s a beautiful park with so many red rocks, we walked around for about an hour and enjoyed climbing on a few of the rocks.
After Garden of the Gods, we headed to dinner at The Airplane Restaurant. This restaurant is built in an old Boeing KC-97 tanker. When I saw this, I knew Ryan would love to see it. The food was honestly average, but it was really cool to see and we sat up in the plane for our meal!
We finished out the night doing a little shopping. We made a Target run for water and snacks and also stopped at Sierra Trading Post. If you haven’t shopped at a Sierra before, it’s the TJMaxx/Marshalls of all things outdoors! I’m glad we stopped here because I bought a lightweight puffer jacket that ended up being much needed later on!
The next morning we headed towards Pikes Peak. We were going back and forth between taking the Cog Railway to the top or just driving. Ultimately, we chose to drive, but the Cog is a great option too! Before we headed up the mountain, we stopped at Red Dog Coffee in Manitou Springs. This is a small town at the bottom of Pikes Peak filled with many restaurants and shops. It is a very touristy area, but early in the morning it wasn’t busy at all. I grabbed coffee and we both got breakfast burritos at Red Dog and they were delicious! We started up the drive to Pikes Peak and very quickly were thankful we chose to drive, as there were so many great photo stops along the way. At the top, we stopped at the visitors center, which was all brand new and really nice. I took a few pictures, grabbed some hot chocolate and we headed back down! It took us about 3 hours to drive up and back down the mountain, which included a few picture stops both ways.
When we got back to Manitou Springs, there were a few restaurants we wanted to try for lunch, however, after driving around for about 30 minutes we could not find any parking! We continued to drive a little further out of town and landed at Trails End Taproom. They had all kinds of beers and ciders on tap, but we were mainly focused on food, which the food did not disappoint!
Rocky Mountain National Park
fter our morning and afternoon in Pikes Peak/Manitou Springs, we headed on our drive to Longmont. Longmont is about 1 hour 45 minutes from Colorado Springs, and it’s about 45 minutes outside of Rocky Mountain National Park. It was a little bit of a rainy drive and when we got to our hotel we were ready for a nap. We ended up just resting and Door Dashing dinner from Fuzzy’s Tacos….YUM!
The next morning, we woke up around 3:00 a.m. to get ready and head to the park. At the time, they were only allowing entry into the park in the 2 hour window that you reserved. We had to reserve our time at recreation.gov. We knew we wanted to do a sunrise hike, so the earliest time to arrive was 5:00-7:00 a.m. We had a very dark drive through the park before we arrived at the Bear Lake trailhead. This is a loop around the lake, and of course if you want to be there for sunrise you have to start hiking in the dark. Our first attempt at the hike, I was TERRIFIED. It was so dark, no one else had gotten out of their cars yet and it was pouring down rain. We made the decision to head back to the car and warm up a bit before trying again. The rain slowed down and turned into snow and we started on the trail again. We ended up about halfway around the lake and found an opening looking east to wait and watch the sunrise. The weather was a little crazy and kept switching between rain and snow, all while being SUPER windy. Ryan had set up his GoPro on a rock to catch a timelapse of the sunrise, but unfortunately he did not listen to his wife, and the wind blew it right off! He had to take off his boots and socks to wade in the water and grab it out of the lake! The screen was cracked but luckily we were still able to use it.
With the weather being rainy and cloudy, we were worried we weren’t going to get much of a sunrise, but it cleared up a little after 7:00 a.m. and it made the freezing cold worth it! Around 8:00 a.m., we started back on the trail to finish the loop and head back to the car. On the way back, it started sleeting on us! Thank goodness this whole loop was only 0.7 miles, because the weather was not ideal.
The next few hours we spent in the warm car, just driving around the park looking for wildlife and pretty views. We saw a ton of elk throughout the day! After driving around a bit, we went to another trailhead for the Chasm Falls Trail, which is 2.5 miles. This is a moderate trail with gorgeous scenery, and the sun finally came out when we did this hike! Chasm Falls was our last stop in the park before we headed out and back towards Denver.
Denver:
We had to fly out the next morning, so we went back to Denver and stayed with one of our friends in his apartment downtown. He ended up taking us to dinner at Stoney’s Bar and Grill because they had a watch party for the UK football game that night. GO CATS! The food was great and the atmosphere was fun! To end the night, we all met up with another friend at 10 Barrel Brewing Company to watch more football, and Ryan had dinner round 2 haha!
Final Notes
This was another quick trip for us, but we had so much fun and the fall foliage in Colorado was amazing, I can’t wait to go back again!
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