Since we hadn’t planned any of our days before arriving in Colorado it left us with the freedom to decide on a whim. We had pulled a bunch of flyers for things from the airport and our hotel. We decided to go to the Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine in the morning. We got super lost on our way there, no thanks to our Garmin and iPhones, but once we got there it was so worth it! We got to go 1,000 feet underground in one of those tiny miner cages. When I say tiny, I mean tiny, and there were six of us in there. Needless to say we got VERY close to our friends from Ohio. Our tour guide was so good and at the end of the tour each of us got a piece of rock with gold in it. I would definitely recommend it to anyone going out there. Hannah and I both picked up some awesome jewelry from their giftshop as well.

They had the greatest hand painted typography around the grounds, below are my favorites.

On our way to the Gold Mine we passed this Swiss restaurant which had Hannah fit to be tied as she LOVES Swiss food. So of course on our way back we stopped there for lunch. I couldn’t help but laugh when they presented a whiteboard in front of us for their menu, haha. Hannah had the schnitzel and I had the salmon club sandwich, both meals were absolutely fantastic.

After lunch we decided to stop by the Cave of the Winds. We were hoping to get to go on the lantern tour, but it was sold out. The tour we went on was still very cool, had had the most fantastic views from the parking lot.

After Cave of the Winds we stopped by Garden of the Gods. This was one of the best parts of the trip for me, it was absolutely BEAUTIFUL and we had so much fun climbing up the rocks.

There were so many fantastic photo opportunities, we just couldn’t stop taking them! This was a moment that we both wished we had a tripod with us, so we could have taken more pictures with the two of us. Instead we played a lot of “your turn, my turn, oh quick wait take one for me to instagram!”. We had an absolutely blast!

We found this little nook that decided to climb up into to take pictures, we quickly learned that it was much easier to climb up, than down. We had a good laugh about our efforts to climb down without falling.

Then we got a little braver and took pictures laying down on the side of the rocks, where on wrong turn and we would have tumbled all the way back down. It was so much fun, we never wanted to leave. In fact we stayed so long that by the time we got back to our hotel all the restaurants had closed (it was Sunday) and we had to resort to ordering Papa Johns, it was so worth it though.

This is my absolute favorite picture of Hannah from the entire trip, it captures her personality perfectly.

Happy Traveling,
Jennifer

To read about Day 1 – go here. To view more pictures of our trip – go here.