Diary of a Road Trip: Denver to Cortez

Day 4 - Denver to Cortez, CO
     Miles: 416
     Hours: 8
     Stayed with: Sadly we had
     to stay in a hotel
     States: 1 - CO - Which
     would have seemed like a
     complete failure if we
     didn't love it so much.


From Denver we drove to the Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs to see some cool rocks and we learned that altitude sickness is real.  We walked around for about an hour and were completely exhausted, out of breath, and overheated.

Colorado has the most beautiful mountains, rocks, and scenery in general though. Driving around we went up and down some crazy huge hills (mountains really...).  At first it seemed like my car was having a hard time with the altitude, but we ended up getting incredible gas mileage anyway (thank you down-hills).  We had dinner in the quaint town of Durango (at the advice of our hosts the previous evening) and stayed in Cortez so we would have easy access to Four Corners the following morning.