Summer Vacation: Colorado

Well, we got home from vacation 4 weeks ago to the day of this writing, and I'm just now getting around to blogging about it. Sure things have been crazy, but my biggest barrier to start blogging our vacation was that I knew I'd have to sort through about 5oo photos, make edits, write, etc. It's pretty overwhelming even as I write this.

So baby steps are in order, I'll start by covering the first few days and hopefully have the entire vacation blogged within a week or so.

We decided to go to Colorado this year. Why did we choose Colorado? Well... the best reason is we couldn't come up with anything better to go that was within a more reasonable distance (if you call nearly 1000 miles each way at today's gas prices "reasonable," that is). I lived in Denver for a summer during college while I did my internship, and loved it. Nikki has been there too, so since there's lots for the kids to see and do as well, it seemed like a good choice. I'm glad we did.

As I did last year, here are a few stats from our vacation:

• Miles Driven: 3126
• Hours Driving during 9 days of vacation: ~ 55
• Emergency bathroom breaks: 2 (still room for improvement, but I'm not complaining...)
• States visited during trip: 6 (MN, IA, NE, CO, WY, and SD)
• Survived a Hail Storm?: yes (2 years running now)
• Cost for new brakes on van because people ahead of us didn't know how to drive in the mountains on vacation: $487
• Number of nights staying in hotel: 9
• Number of nights we paid for a hotel: 1 (we used my Hilton points for every night except our last night in Wall, SD - since Hilton didn't have any nearby hotels)
• Stops at McDonalds: only 1
• Moving/Traffic violations: 0