Days 30-36: The Colorful State

(Please don't forget everything I said about Wyoming in my last post. It is a wild, distinctive place that I hope you will check out. And yet..)

Laramie is a dreary city in southeast Wyoming. There doesn't seem much to do besides eat fast food until you're morbidly obese, or experiment with meth. Though I did see a CrossFit.

Driving south on highway 287 from Laramie, you begin to notice little pops of red rocks coming out of the ground. These rock-sprouts are strong willed, insouciant. Who gave them the right to pop up like that? How did rocks start to rise up from the earth?

Shortly after the first red rock sighting, it's like someone flipped a switch from Ugly to Pretty. Scrubby hills give way to tree-covered mountains.

Welcome to Colorado.

I spent a few days in the greater Denver area, catching up with friends. I won't tell you too much about Denver, because big cities are kind of off limits for this blog. The places in-between are the ones I'll focus on. Let me limit myself to one photo and one piece of advice.

First, the advice - if you ever find a great job or fabulous significant other in Denver, definitely check it out. 300 days of sun per year, fabulous network of bike trails throughout the city, your usual cool urban stuff, and beautiful mountains all around. Here's a shot from Denver's Cherry Creek bike trail:

But (friends aside!) my favorite part of Colorado wasn't the Denver area. It was the mountains west of the city. OK, so you have heard of Vail, Breckenridge, Aspen, Telluride. I knew these places as ski resorts, and had no idea if driving through in October would be anything special.

WOW. I was blown away by how beautiful it is up there. There are a bunch of scenic drives that wind through old mining towns, deciduous and evergreen forests, and mountain lakes. You are more than 10,000 feet above sea level, so some of the tallest peaks in the continental US look like hills.

One of these small towns is Leadville (forgive the poor photo quality):

In Gunnison, I went for a run and spotted a few places I'd love to live:

Turns out I'm not the first big city person to want to live in this part of Colorado.

Finally, a rant about iOS6 and Apple's horrid new version of Maps. These days, I am a Maps power user and Apple's garbage has thrown me for a loop. In the past week, Apple maps has:

1. Suggested a route through 100 miles of Forest Service roads, instead of main highways.

2. Siri has barked at me "Turn right onto I-70 East." Then, 30 seconds later, "turn left on I-70 West."

3. Let's not forget the basic design flaw that you can't easily see the next step that's upcoming in the directions. This means that you don't know which lane to get in - which is a major bummer in a 29' vehicle in a big city.

And yes, Tim Cook, you CAN use Google Maps or Bing or whatever instead. But when you are using maps programs in a browser, they will reload whenever you open up Safari - and if you are out of cell range, you are SOL.

Until Apple is shamed into giving us back Google Maps, I'm using a great new Maps app I found: