Hello Friends and Family,
This is Maryn and Colter and we are creating our very first blog. We hope you can be here with us though our writing.

Today we began our adventure heading towards southern Colorado.  We arrived at Linda's with excitement, hope and CUPCAKES! No road trip is complete without road trip food!

When we drove up to Linda's house, we were surprised to see her sitting on her driveway with thousands of bags piled hundreds of feet high. Well, actually, she had a lot of stuff that we had to squeeze into the car…..we suppose it takes a lot of packing to go on a 7-day adventure.

We started heading south towards Colorado Springs with anticipation to see what will unfold on this journey. Our first stop was at Garden of the Gods Visitor Center. When we walked in what immediately caught our eyes was life-sized vegetarian dinosaur. We named her Maryn! Next we went to see a movie about the history of the world. This fit in with the studying we have been doing so far in school!

We took a little hike around the Garden of the Gods that had huge red and white rocks that were millions of years old. We felt like little ants under giant skyscrapers! The Ancestral Rockies have been there for millions of years and are still standing tall and proud. If you looked closely, you can see birds' nests wedged in small nooks and crannies high up on the cliff tops. The red rocks, with the beautiful black and white streaks seemed to add vibrant color to our amazing landscape. We had a great picnic under these cliffs.

Our next destination was to the amazing Royal Gorge.We pulled off at the Royal Gorge welcome sign, took some pictures and pigged out on some awesome homemade rainbow cupcakes. The pictures show our frosting mustache and lipstick. As you can tell,  sometimes we have to have a silly break from all this education!

When we arrived a the parking lot, we were stunned that we couldn't see the bottom of the gorge when we first looked over the edge. Once Linda let us go a little closer to the fence, we could see a fraction of the river almost 1000 feet below.

Guess what we did next?! We rode the gondola across the gorge. All of the super positioning was amazing to see in real life. Then, as a treat, we got to zipline back across the gorge. Our feet were dangling 1000 feet above the river as we plummeted toward the other side. We felt like we were flying!
Fortunately a huge spring caught us before we hit the concrete wall on the other side.

In Salida, we had a delicious Mexican dinner. We are now writing from out hotel room before we go to bed.

Our first day was packed with excitement and joy.
From Colter and Maryn