/\^Rocky Mountain National Park^/\

Our family vacation destination this year, was Estes Park, Colorado and Rocky Mountain National Park. Because of the flooding at the end of the summer, we had to go the looong way. It took us almost 12 hours to get there. The girls did so awesome in the car! I was really surprised. The bonus for going the long way was there were lots of tunnels! The girls loved that part. Every tunnel Halia would say in this tiny little voice, "Woo-Hoo, it's funny!" This was the longest tunnel, not sure how long, but it took several minutes to go through. O yeah it was snowing most of the drive there.

 It was really such a beautiful drive. Well worth being in the car for a long time.

 Sprauge Lake in RMNP.

 This was at Bear Lake in RMNP.

 Brought all our snow gear...but forgot gloves. It was pretty traumatic.We bought gloves shortly after.

 We stayed in a condo that had a hot tub on the deck, Quincy's favorite part about the whole trip, Halia not so much, she only was in for a minute before she asked to go watch Cinderella:)

 We saw more elk in Estes Park, the town we stayed in, than we did in the national park itself. The snow made it seem like Christmas, it was pretty fun to wake up to a couple inches of snow.

 Then we hiked to Alberta Falls in the all this snow. Quincy was in heaven! We had to stop about every 20ft to make snowballs. Halia was a trooper, but super happy to get back to the car. The poor little sweetheart!

 Glacier Gorge

 We did lots and lots of elk viewing, they were still bugling. The elk were everywhere so it was pretty fun to be able to sit in the car and watch and listen to them from about 50yrds away! The girls really liked watching and listening to them, especially Quincy this kind of stuff is right up her ally.

 Lots of beautiful nature!

 Elk everywhere, even on people's lawns as you can see, but they don't even care that people park and watch them! Of course there were a few crazy people, we saw, that walked right up to them.

 Alluvial Fan and a beautiful sunset, o and Halia getting in a quick nap.

 They both got Jr. Ranger badges. That was really fun for Quincy, she did all the work and then I just copied all she wrote in her book into Halia's book.

 Silly girl, so moody!

 Hike to Gem Lake, it was 1.9 miles and the last half was extremely steep and icy, we were not aware how difficult it would be with two small kids until we were an hour in, but Quincy was a rock star and only got a few short piggy backs and did the rest herself!!

 She wanted to sleepover at the top, because she was so tired and didn't want to think about going back down, but she made it back down and was pretty proud of herself!

 The Stanley Hotel, where the shining was filmed. This big guy up above was on the front lawn.

Really beautiful, but a little eerie:/

 The drive home felt like way more than 12 hours! We left pretty early, so this is a crappy picture of that tunnel from the other side. We had a lot of whining go on, for the ride home, but they still did better than I expected. What little troopers! We had a really fun time, it was such a beautiful trip!! Well worth the drive, the cold, and the snow!!