Glenwood Springs - Grand Junction

What a great start to our trip!

In 2013, Glenwood Springs was named the most fun city in the US, so I knew we would not be losing time while there. 

Woke up early, and at breakfast I found many maps of cycling routes. A great ride is the 25 miles bike path between Glenwood and Aspen, the Rio Grande trail.  

But then I saw on the map this nice climb, 24 miles long, difficult level, with great views and right by my hotel. Perfect, I was ready for it! Got an extra protein bar in my pocket, and told Florencia that I could take a little longer than expected.

The beggining was really spectacular, with great panoramic views (pic in the left down corner), but  I didn't ride too long, before ending up with no outlet, and opening the map again, to find a comma in between numbers 2 and 4, so my climb became 10 times shorter (or 2,4 miles!). haha Disappointed I resumed the workout on the bike path getting close to some beautiful canyon views.

Bike: 24mi - 1h18min

Back to the hotel I met a couple who was ready to go for a bike tour. He was saying to the hotel staff: "We left the car in the hotel parking lot, is that ok!? We will ride for about 2 hours or 5 minutes, depends on the weather." So I saw how lucky I was to be done at that time, as before the fastest clock's hand could turn a loop, it came a pretty heavy rain, that lasted almost for an hour, flooding the hotel entrance. 

When finally the rain went away, we rushed to go to an amusement park located on the top of this mountain. We got there by tram over a beautiful view. And we headed first over a giant swing, just on the edge on that huge clif. In the last picture below you can see how much fun we had together!! Lol

After all that adrenaline of being pulled out of the mountain on the giant swing, we have also joined other stressless attractions and visited two caverns plenty of geology lessons and also nice fun tales. 

The problem came on the time to go away. The heavy rain came back and due to the lightening, the tram went out of work, so we had to wait on the cold of the rain, for almost one hour before getting an improvised bus to get us down to the base, where the Isuzu was waiting for us.

After that cold, nothing better than a hot springs swimming pool! And what if its a 405ft long swimming pool!? Amazing!!

Every swimmer knows how nice is to enter in a warm swimming pool (90°F), and just to enter! As after warming up in a few strokes, it gets terrible hot. But on that day, I had just an easy one, so it was all  very nice!!

Swim: 1600y - 25min

Back in the Isuzu, heading West, we didn't drive that far, until getting into the Colorado National Monument, with no words to describe such amazingness, here follows some shots . . . 

The National Park is located near Grand Junction, and has about 24 miles on a curvy road that crosses it, almost reaching the nearby city, Fruita.

There is more than 10 panoramic view points, with many hike options. We got there by the end of the day and had to rush to drive through all the roadway.

This was one of the best parks in our trip, and we both wished we have had more time to explore it, I would say you wanna spend like 4-5 hours on this park.

On the dark, and already tired, we came back to Grand Junction and found a pretty good hotel, also economic, right in downtown, Historic Melrose Hotel, if by chance you are passing by!

Click here to go to the 3rd day of our Journey...