21.-27.08.2006: Estes Park (Rocky Mountains NP) - Denver On Monday the weather took a turn for the worse and we found ourselves in a hailstorm! It's a good job we didn't set off early to go walking! Within minutes everything was covered in a blanket of hail and it looked like winter - August in the Rockies!! The storm didn't last long and the sun came out. It wasn't long before all evidence of the storm had melted. When Judy got back from work she found it difficult to believe that we'd had hail at all! During the afternoon Helen decided to bake a cake. But it turned into a disaster because the cake rose too much. Normally this would be a good thing - but not in our oven because if it rises too much it gets burnt which is exactly what happened! So Helen divided the rest of the cake mix to make three cakes instead of the normal two. But then she had real problems getting the cake out of the baking tins and it broke in half! Well it tasted the same but it looked disastrous! On Tuesday we drove down to the visitor centre and caught two shuttle busses up to Bear Lake in the National Park. We were going to do 9.5 mile loop walk from Bear Lake via Odessa and Fern Lakes and then catch a shuttle back. The first hour was a steep uphill climb for over an hour but then it was downhill for most of the rest of the way. We were above the tree line at the top and it was a bleak but beautiful landscape. On the way down we saw an elderly man sitting on a rock at the side of the path. As we approached he said "Howdy, Howdy". We said hello and carried on along the path. We didn't think anything of it until about 15 minutes later when 2 ladies asked us if we'd passed an elderly man who was in serious trouble. We told them about the Howdy guy but that he hadn't said anything about being in trouble. The ladies had just come across his friend who was also having trouble and was trying to get down to the end of the path to call for help. No-one's cell phones were working up here. So we said we would head on down and find someone with a cell phone that worked and call the emergency rangers out. The two ladies headed up to the Howdy guy to stay with him and wait. We carried on down and met the friend "Bob". Another lady was staying with him. He looked in bad shape. Both men were in their 70s, had set off 6 hours earlier from Bear Lake to do the same walk we were doing, but only had 1 litre of water each with them! Absolute madness at their age - in high altitude, doing a long walk with very little to drink with them. Bob was struggling to get his breath and we gave him a litre of water for him to drink. He told us that his friend (Howdy) had a heart defibrillator implant and needed a horse to get him down off the mountain! We told Bob to stay where he was, drink the water we'd given him, and set off at a pace down the mountain hoping to come across someone with a cell phone that worked. The first two sets of people either hadn't got cell phones or they didn't work. At 2-30pm we met Barbara and Paul. Their cell phone worked but then we had to search for a number to phone on the various maps we had. The first ranger emergency number came back as "this number not available"!! So we hunted for another one. Fortunatley it worked. Helen spoke to dispatch and gave them all the information that we had. We were asked to stay where we were with the cell phone to await a return call and rangers would be dispatched to us. Poor Barbara and Paul - it meant that their walk had just come to an abrupt end. We got a call back and just then Bob joined us! He hadn't drunk any of the water we had given him, in fact he had just left it where we'd seen him and carried on down the path! So we got him to talk to dispatch. It took 90 minutes from the time of the first phone call, for the first ranger to turn up. He had run the whole way up and only briefly stopped to tell us that "Cindy" was on her way. He wanted to get up to "Howdy". Only a few minutes later Cindy ran up and quickly checked Bob. We were given the go- ahead to carry on walking down with Bob to meet up with other rangers who would check Bob properly. Cindy carried on running up the path and we started a slow walk down. A total of 12 rangers had been sent up. One group had a large bouncy ball attached to a wheelbarrow type frame with an attachable stretcher that was in the shape of a seat. This would be used to "carry" Howdy off the mountain. They needed so many rangers because Howdy was a very heavy man! Two rangers spent an hour with Bob, checking him out thoroughly and finally gave us the go-ahead to continue walking down with him. He had recovered quite a lot since we had first met him, and we knew that if we took it steady he would make it down with us. We finally got down to the car park at 7pm where Barbara and Paul's truck was. They gave us all a lift back to the shuttle. Barbara, Helen and Kirsten sat in the flat bed of the truck so that Bob got the comfy seat in the front! It had been a very long day but we were glad that we had managed to help out. We really enjoyed chatting to Barbara and Paul and exchanged email addresses with them. We finally left and went to the campground to dump and also to phone Judy. She had invited us for a meal that evening and we needed to tell her that we were alright and on our way. We got back at 8pm and told Judy all about our emergency! She'd been on a different frequency and so hadn't heard about it. But later, her friend Sandy came along. She'd heard everything on the radio and when she found out that we were involved she said " Holy sh--, was that you?!!!" We had a really good meal with Judy - grilled trout, salad, roast chicken and lots of yummy dips with tortilla chips. It was after 11pm by the time we left. What a day! Wednesday was a cleaning day and we also did all our washing. We went out to get pizza which we shared with Judy. On Thursday, Kirsten downloaded our latest update onto the internet and we said a fond goodbye to Judy. Then we drove down to Denver and stayed at a Walmart for the night. Friday was Kirsten's big day! We caught a bus and tram into the town centre and went to the Convention Centre to go and see Melissa Etheridge, live in concert. We queued up to get our tickets that had been booked over the phone months earlier. A woman in front of us paid $100 for a ticket in row 23 which was the closest row available. We checked on the plan and found out that we were literally in the back left hand corner of the hall - we couldn't get further away from the stage if we tried!!! Well what do you expect when you buy the cheapest tickets! Kirsten hadn't brought her camera with her because we didn't think we would be allowed in with it. There was no way we would hand it over to anyone until the end of the concert and we knew we wouldn't be able to return it to Winnie. So we didn't risk bringing it. But we never even got checked going into the waiting area in front of the hall! So Kirsten was really annoyed that she hadn't got a camera with her. But then we got a real surprise that made up for it.....Our tickets got upgraded to the $100 tickets in row 22 for free!!!!! It was a great concert and we were surprised that it wasn't sold out. Melissa played for 2 hours 40 minutes along with her band (superb drummer and guitarists) and played music (see list) from throughout her 20 year career. There were 3,100 people in the crowd. We have seen her in Hamburg where the crowd was very mixed. But here in Denver, 95% were women and 95% of them were fat and ugly!!!! We have never seen anything like it - it was like being in the middle of some sort of freak show. Amazing. We saw first hand what a weight problem America has! We got back just after midnight and were starving so we went to a McDonalds (the cause of America's obesity???) but only the drive-through was open. So went to the window - on foot!! It really confused the server! But eventually our "walk-through" worked and we got our food. On Saturday we got up really early (after a really late night!) to drive down to south Denver and meet up with Sandi, our friend from Calgary who we met 9 years ago on our long China/Asia trip. We had real problems finding Sandi's sister's address. There were road works and a diversion which didn't help and then we were running out of petrol! Eventually we had to stop and Kirsten went into a house to ask! It turned out that there are two estates with the same road names and we just happened to be in the wrong one! Kirsten managed to contact Sandi who said she would meet us at a road junction and eventually met up with her, two hours later!!! We parked Winnie up at a mall but there was only one cafe. So we got into Sandi's car and she got lost looking for a restaurant!!! Denver is not the easiest of places to find your way around! We managed to find a restaurant and spent the next 4 hours eating and catching up on everything that has happened sice we met up in 2002. Sandi is opening up a Bed and Breakfast in Nairobi called "Ndemi" which will be opening in November this year. We will put up the website and details on here when we get them. We had a great time and unfortunately our short time together went far too quickly and it was time to say goodbye again. We will just have to go over to Nairobi!!! On Sunday we went to the library, had a shower at Flying J's and dumped, and then found a huge Outdoor World that was filled with stuffed, wild animals. We were looking for some more travel trousers with zips to make them into shorts but they were all too expensive, or didn't look right when we tried them on. Later we went to Flaming Dave's for some super Spare ribs and stuffed ourselves in Winnie.