Just thought I’d post a few pictures of my road trip within a road trip the other day. Even my mother thinks I’m weird. In the middle of a 1250 mile road trip with Sarah and the kids, I took a day and drove 300 miles to see some sand dunes. See what I mean about weird? I think they used to call that a busman’s holiday. Anyway, the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve is located about 25 miles north of Alamosa, Colorado, and I had heard of it for some time and have been wanting to see it, so I took the opportunity (and Mommer’s Forester) and made the trip.
Their dunes are the tallest in North America and cover a much larger area than ours (330 square miles) . For a size comparison, the specks on the next picture are people who are out walking on the dunes.
They have some streams that run around the perimeter of their dunes, which I thought was kind of neat, since we have no open water at all. This one is called Castle Creek and was only running about an inch deep.
As a national park, they don’t allow vehicles out on the dunes, so walking is the only way to get out there, and as I’ve done my share of sand hiking for my lifetime, I didn’t go out very far. But I did find some pretty Sand Verbena flowers and almost all of them had a big green caterpillar busy eating the leaves on them.
Anyway it was a fun trip and another tick off the bucket list. I didn’t get any sand because we already have them in our collection at the park, but you can see the difference in color between them and us.
They might be bigger, but I think we are prettier.
