This is the second post about my spring break trip to Colorado. If you missed the first one, you can read it here!

The next morning, Andrew looked up some mechanics that had good reviews and then called to see if they could fit us in. Thankfully it was only three miles away, so my car struggled the whole three miles up those darn hills. The engine kept shuddering… I thought my car was going to explode. The mechanic said it could take all day for them to fix it, depending on what was wrong, and suggested some shops down the street for us to busy ourselves with.

The shops weren’t much, but we did find a little miniature golf place! It looked pretty old and the games were only $3 a person, but we had nothing better to do. It turned out to be so much fun! Andrew and I are both competitive so it was pretty funny to see us both do so terrible. On the last hole, you won a free game if you got a hole-in-one. Andrew managed to get a hole-in-one and scored himself a free game! We still hadn’t heard from the mechanic, so we paid the $3 more for me and played another game. I won both times, but Andrew got another hole-in-one so obviously we had to play again.

Andrew called the mechanic to see what was going on with our car, and they said they were just waiting on a part to be delivered and that it should be done before noon. I was absolutely elated that we wouldn’t be losing a full day due to the car troubles and about halfway through our third game of mini-golf, the mechanic called to say my car was ready. I had no idea how much it was going to cost (but I was just envisioning $$$$ in my head) but it turned out it was something minor, so thank goodness, that was such a relief.

Since we still had a bit of time, we headed back to Rocky Mountain National Park to do some things we didn’t have time for the day before. We started with Bear Lake. A lot of people seemed to be hiking up to go skiing, but we just hiked around the lake and even ventured out on top! Like Sprague Lake, Bear Lake was completely frozen and probably had a foot and a half of snow on top. I liked Bear Lake more though because it had better views of the mountains.

We went down some different roads that we hadn’t gone down before the day before and saw some new views. Some of the roads led off to dead ends, so to get to the end of the road the day before, we missed a lot. So the second day was almost more fun because we were looking for off-the road spots that other people weren’t going.

We found a spot great for climbing on an outcropping of rocks. They were scattered down a fairly steep hill (or side of the mountain! haha), so we carefully worked our way down. It was incredible to just stand there in the cold air, without anyone else near or around you, and to just take in everything. I could’ve stayed there for years.

After climbing around and exploring for the better half of the afternoon, we were pretty tired. We already had the car packed up since we had to checkout from the hotel earlier, so we left the park and headed for Denver! It was hard to say goodbye to the Estes Park area because everything was so beautiful. But I guess that is what makes traveling so special.