Life of Siew Gin, Alan and the 2 kids - Tyler and Cody: Adventures to Southwest Colorado

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Adventures to Southwest Colorado - Day 3

After an awesome first day at the ruins, the boys were excited to know that we were going to visit two more! The first one we did was Balcony House. It had quite few ladders to climb(one of them was a 32 ft ladder) and a cliff face exit which was a little daunting to hear. The ruin itself was not terribly exciting but the ranger talked about their daily lives which was interesting to hear!

Despite the physical challenges on this tour, kids did great and even had lots of fun! After that we drove around the Mesa Top Loop to view some other dwellings from afar and visit some ruins on the top of the mesa, before we broke for a quick lunch. Then we headed to Long House which was our last ranger tour.

To get to the Long House, we had to ride a tram which was exciting for the kids. By now, Tyler was really familiar with the tours and was always eager to be the 2nd in command after the ranger. Everytime the ranger said, let's continue, he'd jump and run along behind him and he'd be very excited to tell us he was the first behind the ranger.

Long House was also another impressive dwelling. It was interesting to see some greens at the bottom of the cave to give us an idea how the Indians survived in the very dry climate. As we made our steep hike back to the top, we thought for sure the kids were ready to konk out.

But no, they want to go for ONE last one(the Step House) which was a mile walk from the ranger station at the Long House. It was a hot hike down but I came prepared with an umbrella! It was cool because this cliff dwelling had a pit house and had two civilization that was separated by 200 years in one site. They also had some ancient step.

With that, we wrapped up our trip to Mesa Verde and the kids were wiped out and dozed off before we got out of the park.

We then started our drive to Ouray which was another few hours away. I slept the first part of the drive and woke up to a completely different landscape. We were in high country and were surrounded by beautiful mountains and green pine trees.

We then made our way through the pass and went on the Million Dollar Highway which had views that were worth a million dollars!! The drive though beautiful is not for the faint of hearts! We reached Ouray just about dinner time and after checking in to our next home away from home, headed over to a Saloon type restaurant for a nice meal of steak.