who's planning this thing, anyways?!?

Our day in Rocky Mountain NP began by traversing the Trail Ridge Road - its a particularly scenic mountain drive which crosses the Continetal Divide and is the world's highest continuous paved highway topping out at 12,183 feet. Now we get to the part of this story that is the reason for this post's title. I don't know how aware you readers are of this, but we've done very little planning for this trip. I mean, we picked some destinations, stuck them in the calendar, and managed to talk to Hillary (our first night's host) the day before we left. That was about it. We've managed to catch camping sites or backcountry passes ever since then and even more amazingly we've added two more National Parks than we intended to visit (Zion and Death Valley) despite having a gruelingly packed schedule. It became obvious a while ago that even though we're not planning the trip too thoroughly, Someone else is way ahead of us. Well, today we were driving to the park when we realized that 1: the Trail Ridge Road is the only way into the park from anywhere near where we were and 2: according to our travel book "Plowing the road for its Memorial Day weekend opening can be a two-month project. A particularly interesting time to drive the road is shortly after it opens - the snowbanks can easily reach 20 ft hight." Yeah, and what day was it? Memorial Day. So had we arrived just a few days earlier, the road would have been closed, blocking entry to the park. But not only did we just manage to make it in, but we caught the route at the most interesting time possible! Thanks, God - you're pretty good at this planning stuff.
The road itself was nice. We were above the treeline for a long while in Alpine Tundra (think Siberia) and got out to hike around some. (Ellen: I was in my chaco sandles and despite the pain in my toesies, this Georgia girl thoroughly enjoyed the snow!!!)
We contiued on to the East side of the park, secured one of the best campsites from a nice Virginia boy, and got established. I'll write another post about our afternoon excursions. Things got crazy and its bound to be a long post. ;)

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