Climb Every Mountain

Destination: Denver, CO
Total Miles: over 3,000
Cost: $300 (give or take a few)

Last year was truly the year of far traveling for myself. My list of  places visited (just in the year 2012) includes: Seattle, WA; NYC (twice); Denver, CO; Boston, MA; plus multiple road trips (Concord, NH; Charleston, SC (twice); Victoria, BC; Knoxville, TN (several times).

So, why bring up an old trip, you ask?

Because in 13 days, I will be heading back to Colorado...which was one of my favorite places (ok, so I say that about all of them, but I really did like each one for different reasons).

Nursing school may not be the best place to meet a vast number of people, but it is an excellent place to find friends with similar interests.

One such person is my friend, Caroline.

She grew up in Colorado, but her family moved for a couple years to Greenville, SC. Even though she was a few years below me in school, we became good friends (it's a long story that I won't go into). Before she graduated from college, her family (which is one kid bigger than mine) moved back to Colorado.

I was invited to visit, and as I had never been to Colorado and wanted to hang out after she graduated...I bought a plane ticket.

Mind you, I am a Southerner. And I love warm weather. So, my trip (and this future one, too) was planned during the month of July.




The mountains...


The Rocky Mountains are indescribably magnificent. And I fell in love.

I stayed for 5 days, during which we covered a lot of ground. Literally. We drove up both Mount Evans and Pike's Peak, walked through Red Rocks, visited Colorado Springs and Garden of the Gods, shopped around Breckinridge, rafted through Brown's Canyon, and just hung out.

My vocabulary felt very limited..."amazing," "wow," "incredible," and "breath-taking" were about all I could manage. The Rocky Mountains (so named because of the innumerable rocks that make them up...versus my mountains, the Smokies, which constantly have pockets of fog rising from them which look like smoke) were not what I was expecting.

And I am very excited about going back for another visit!

So stayed tuned...in a couple weeks, you will see my vast vocabulary (which someone informed me was several thousand words larger than normal people because I am a "medical professional") reduced to "wow."

:)