Mini Vacation to Steamboat

Since I had worked so much the last month, we took the week of labor day off.  Michael and I had already taken the Friday off to fly to Wisconsin for a wedding so we only had to take three more days off for vacation.  We decided to go camping in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which is about three hours northwest of Denver.  I had been there before in college and Mike has been there for work, but we have never been there together, and they have great fishing and mountain biking so it was perfect!

We left Tuesday morning after getting a couple things done around the house and taking time to load up all our camping stuff.  We arrived in Steamboat around 2:00pm, and went for a mountain bike ride first thing. 

The leaves were starting to change and it was just beautiful!  And perfect weather as well!

We rode for about an hour and a half at Haylsen peak.  It was a mountain biking dream, one of the best rides I have been on in awhile.  It was so pretty and you are riding in the trees!  Not just pines and such, but aspens and singletrack...you really have to love mountain biking to really understand, but it was great.

We then ran by Qdoba and got me some dinner, because I was starving and didn't think we had packed enough food.  Which we didn't so it was a good thing we stopped.  I mean, we had enough, we wouldn't have starved, but we would have been a tad hungry.

We then had quite the adventure finding a campsite.  We didn't really have a plan going up there so we weren't exactly sure where we were going.  We stopped by the forest service to find out a good place to  fish and camp and they gave us a general area, but we still weren't sure where we were going.  We finally found a place after traversing some back country on dirt roads with our bike rack.  This was after we stopped there the first time and thought we would find a better spot, so we drove for another half an hour realizing that their wasn't one, so we drove back, but anyway...

I present, our campsite

We are actually right on the Yampa river so Mike can fish.  And you can't see it, but down the hill a short ways behind me, we have a hammock set up, and Mike was going to sleep in it.

We had the usual guests at our campsite, you know, a fox...

This cute little fella just came and sat at our campsite.  He would leave, and then come back, then leave, then come back.  It was pretty cool but we felt bad for him because that means that he is used to people feeding him, and hopefully that doesn't get him into trouble.  He definitely really wasn't that afraid of us.

Michael trying to make it look like the fox was sitting on his finger

It got pretty chilly that night (it is September) and Michael was trying to sleep in the hammock I bought him as a gift.  He hoped that maybe it wouldn't hurt his back as much as the tent does.  He didn't really get to find out, he was so cold that he had to come in the tent with me in the middle of the night.

But we were up bright and early to fish!

Michael was using his fly rod and I just had a spinning reel.

And I caught a fish!  The only fish we caught all morning.

After we finished fishing, we headed back home, with the plan to stop and mountain bike in Winter Park on the way.  Of course we tried to stop and let Michael catch a fish too, which landed us with a $70.00 fine, but I'm bitter and I don't want to talk about it.  And no, Michael did not even catch a fish. 

Winter Park was pretty, but wasn't as much fun to ride as Steamboat.  They have their mountain set up very "gravity" oriented, meaning that they cater to downhill riding where you put your bike on the lift and ride up and then ride down.  We had a very hard time going up the mountain because you cannot ride up the downhill trails.  We finally found a way though and the downhill was pretty awesome, especially since they had it set up for that. 

And so ends our mini-vacation.  We crammed so much into the labor day week!  We got back later on Wednesday, then Thursday we flew out for my cousin's wedding in Wisconsin.  More on that soon.