Megan’s Take
Today we left Rocky Mountain National Park, and Phil and I are definitely feeling bummed about that. Even though we’re about ready to go home, it’s sad to leave the nature. We have a few days left in the greater Denver area, but I wish I had planned our trip differently so that we ended with being in nature before driving home. Neither of us enjoy being in a large city much, so even though vacation isn’t over, our trip feels different now that we’ve left all the deserts, mountains, and forests behind us.
We went to the alluvial fan in the Fall River Rd section of RMNP to let Emilia and Emmett play on rocks one last time.
(It was also close to Cinnamon’s cinnamon roll bakery, which had been on my bucket list.)
Then we packed up to come to the Loveland RV Resort in Loveland CO. Somehow we lucked into an oversized site with a large grassy area at the end, so it’s fairly nice for a city campground. It also has a vintage mini golf,
a playground,
and a swimming pool,
which the kids were excited about.
Other than doing the campground activities, the only big activity for today was going to the Colorado Model Railroad Museum. The kids were excited and interested in the trains,
but their attention span for model railroads is short.
Phil probably enjoyed it the most and spent quite a bit of time talking to the volunteers. (There were SO many volunteers walking around running the tracks. They clearly really enjoy it.)
Phil’s Take
Today is indeed a bummer. I know most folks would love spending time in new cities like Denver, but that’s just not for me. I don’t live in a small town for lack of choice. But most importantly, I love the great outdoors, peace and quiet, and the lack of stress that comes with it.
The kids started the day energetic, unaware of the bummer that it was. Emilia was super helpful, even I helping get her little brother ready.
The Alluvial Fan area was probably the only option for a very short morning trip to the park. We took our picnic blanket up there with our cinnamon rolls and enjoyed it as much as we could. Emilia told me that she thought the Alberta Falls were better, but she still liked it.
We stopped at the Beaver Meadows visitor center on our way back to the campground, checking to see if there were any good exhibits we missed having not been to this visitor center, only to be surprised that there were no exhibits. Apparently they’re all at the Moraine Park Discovery Center nearby, which we visited after we did the Bear Lake hikes. There was a cool little Junior Ranger photo opportunity we couldn’t pass up downstairs next to the theater.
We caught about 3 minutes of the film before bailing because we were out of time. As it was, we didn’t get out of the campground until 10:50, just 10 minutes to spare before the checkout time.
The Colorado Model Railroad Museum (whose display is the featured image at the top of this post) was definitely the highlight of the day for me. While it doesn’t compare in size to EnterTRAINment Junction (which sadly is no more as of January 2025), the railroad is interesting in very different ways. It is much more interactive in that the trains are all being operated by volunteers with remote controls that walk around and interact with visitors. They have working signals to keep them from colliding on shared track, and have a dispatcher in a booth that can control switches and tell people things to keep them all working together. Many of the volunteers are there because the hobby is difficult to build anything of size on your own, but collaboratively in a place like that your can build something big. And of course they like model railroads.
On our way out, Megan clued me in on some details of a Christmas display near the entrance that she read on the back of map they gave us when we came in. Apparently this is just one percent of the while collection that was gifted to the museum, and they rotate the pieces through every Thanksgiving.
Emilia was very disappointed that we didn’t go to the festival today, but we plan to be there all day tomorrow. Since we’re missing fairs back home, we figured we might want to check out something similar here.
The pictures from today are in this gallery.
