Telluride Part 3

To read part one, click here, and to read part two, click here.

After we woke up in the morning, we headed down the scary road and hoped no one would be coming up. Luckily there wasn't, so we went to a cute little coffee shop to get some coffee.

After that, we went to the one and only grocery store in town to get some stuff for breakfast. I wish I would have taken some photos inside because the place was awesome! It was in an old building, and looked like a fancy house inside. The lighting had some chandeliers and other stuff like that that you don't normally see in a grocery store.

When we went there the night before to get stuff for dinner, we also wanted to get some wood, unkowing that we couldn't have campfires. There were boxes of wood at the front of the store, and we figured that we could just tell the cashier that we wanted to grab some on the way out like any other grocery store. When we told her we wanted to buy some wood, she just stared at us. So I repeated it again, and she just kept staring! I looked at Vince with a 'What the fuccccckkk' kind of stare, not knowing what was going on. I tried to say it in a different way saying, 'Fire wood? The kind that burns?' After getting a stare again, I just told Vince to go get the box. A lady at another register realized what was happening though and just went over to our cashier to ring us up for wood, explaining that she doesn't speak English and that she was Russian or something? I felt so bad that she had to work at a register, they should have put her somewhere that she wouldn't have to speak so much with people! Maybe she wanted to learn English that way or something?

But anyways, after that, we were off to the gondolas! 

Parking is pretty much impossible to find anywhere within a few blocks of the gondolas, but somehow we found one 2 blocks away. We had to pay like $.50 an hour or something, and the bummer thing was that you could only pay for three hours! So I had to go back to the car a few times to add more money, passing by this rad bus each time.

I didn't mind paying for parking, though, because the gondola was FREE! So here's how it works. You can start in the small town of Telluride, take a five minute gondola ride to the top of a mountain which has a bike park/hiking trails, and then you can go down the gondola for another 5 minutes to the even smaller town of Mountain Village. There is a road that can take you from Mountain Village to Telluride, but it's close to a half hour drive, so it's faster to just take the gondola.

An even better thing than being free is that you can take pets on. When we were first trying to get Roxi to walk on, she looked at us like we were insane, so I had to lift her up. After getting on and off 5 or 6 times, though, she got the hang of it.

So Vince, Rox and I rode up to the top of the mountain from Telluride with our breakfast. 

We first  filled out his paperwork for the bike park and talked to some guys about the trails.

Then we ate in a breakfast in a huge meadow surrounded by beautiful mountains.

 It was so nice and Roxanne was in heaven being able to run around and eat some dirty snow even though it was 80 degrees out! 

(See that teeny tiny landing strip to the right? There's no way I'd want to land on that!!)

We then took the lift down the mountain to Mountain Village and looked around for a minute. 

Mountain Village is mainly full of resorts and condos and we weren't very impressed so we turned around and went back up and then down the mountain to Telluride.

 We went back to the car to load up on some more parking time and so that Vince could get his bike and gear on so he could ride the park.

After getting his stuff, we went back up the mountain where he got off to ride, but Rox and I kept going to Mountain Village. 

I was tired from all of the hiking and walking we did before, so I took this time to jump on my laptop and read some emails/blogs while sitting in a sunny  courtyard. 

I occasionally took a break when Vince would come see Rox and I to get some water.

Once Vince did a few runs which took an hour or two, we went back to the car that was about to run out of it's parking time and then we packed up and were off to Crested Butte, which I will post about next!