Now I'm ready to go home

The conference was over at about 1 p.m., but my flight back isn't until tomorrow; I don't know what I thought I was going to do with the extra time when I booked the ticket -- have dinner with some friends in Denver, maybe -- but after the weirdness in Colorado Springs, I woke up just wanting to go home.

I called to see if I could fly standby this afternoon, but it would have cost $125, which, really, is too much to pay to leave a beautiful place, so I got in my rental car and started driving with no particular destination in mind.

In Boulder, I stopped at the Celestial Seasonings factory and took a tour -- a random tourist-y thing I never would have done when I lived there. It was interesting -- pretty low on the excitement scale, I suppose, but it smelled fabulous and I liked seeing the originals of the artwork on the boxes. They were packing my favorite flavor while I was there (Madagascar Vanilla Red) AND I got an all silver quarter from 1964 in change while I was there.

After the tour, I headed toward Estes Park -- I wanted to go to Rocky Mountain National Park, but I was pretty sure I didn't have enough daylight... I didn't see anything I felt like stopping for in the town, though, so I kept going and made it into the park by about 5:00.

There were elk everywhere -- I've never seen so many in one place. The male in the picture above was yelling back and forth with another male; they sound kind of like whales trying to talk cow -- a high-pitched, vaguely musical, complaining sort of moo.

I made it to Bear Lake -- my real destination all along, although I wasn't too worried about whether or not I actually got there -- just as the very last of the light was going. It was quite a bit darker than it looks in the picture below -- the shutter was open for about 3 seconds. It was a great day; it reminded me of all of the things I love about Colorado. Now it's almost midnight, I'm in a crappy, over-priced hotel by the airport, and I am ready to sleep.