Heading Home
Today we start on our little road trip home. We got up fairly early and packed up whatever we hadn’t the night before. We had the next rental car reservation for 10:30 at DIA. It was about a 2 hour drive from Leadville, so we took off for Denver at about 9.
It is an interesting drive since the highway still winds up, down and through the mountains, but you’re on a 3 lane highway doing 75 the whole time. There was a hold up where the highway combined into one lane either way on the same side. This was due to construction from the destruction of the wildfire. We saw many burnt trees which were so close to the road at times that it was sometimes a surprise that even as much of the highway was open as it was. I’m talking about 70, so I guess they do whatever they can to get people through on the highway.
We made pretty good time even with the lane closures and got the Enterprise at about 11. We thought we were going to the same desk we got the Ram from, but we were wrong, nothing looked familiar. We’re not sure where we picked the car up from, it’s possble that they have multiple locations at such a big airport, but I think it’s weird. There were definitely many people there that had just landed, just like we were, but this was definitely not the same place we were 2 weeks ago.
We were in the right place as far as the guy at the desk was concerned, so we checked in and went outside to wait for someone to show us to our new rental. Meanwhile the Ram was sitting in the parking lot, waiting for us to come back and switch all of our stuff into the new one.
It took a minute for someone to come and get us as there were a lot of people out there, but eventually my name was called and we went to find a car. The first thing he showed us was a little Nissan Sentra. I was not a fan, but Kacie said it would be fine for the sake of getting out of there, so the Nissan it was. It worked out in the end as the thing got upwards of 45 mpg for our trip home,
We took the Nissan over to the lot where the Ram was parked and switched over all of our belongings. Once that was done, Kacie drove the truck for a final time over to return it, which was about a 30 second transaction. If you’re looking for a quick transaction when you’re going to catch a flight in Denver, Enterprise has you covered.
We stopped just down the street from Enterprise at Wendy’s for a bite and left for Harrisburg a little bit before noon. Denver is kind of the city on the outer boundary of the mountains, especially the airport. Once we were back on 70, it was flat, boring land for the next 12 hours at least.
We pretty much broke the drive down into four, 6 hour blocks. Kacie took the first shift and drove until we found a Pizza Hut, which we had agreed we both wanted earlier. After a delicious pizza, I drove until about 3am while Kacie slept a while. I thought I could go for longer, but figured I had someone else waiting to drive and why risk it since I was pretty tired. Kacie took over and drove until we got to a McDonald’s in Ohio another 6 hours into the drive. This was the first place on our whole trip where you couldn’t eat inside. Carry-out and drive-thru only. Fine with us, we were pretty ready to get home now.
I jumped back into the driver’s seat and drove the rest of the way to Dave and Jaime’s house, and just like that, our big adventure was over.
We had been gone for 2 weeks and had explored an entire state.
We arrived during a blizzard, and left on a typical summer day in Denver.
We were on top of 14,000 foot peaks, and down in 2800 foot canyons.
We saw a lot.
We drove a lot.
We used every second we had to explore as much as we could.
We had fun.
We got engaged.
We switched our stuff over to the little white Ford and took the rental car back to HIA.
Then we drove home.
The End
