RV Road Trip Day 15&16: Back to Denver

Yesterday was the day to drive home. It was the longest drive of the trip and we’re both familiar with driving across Colorado and the accompanying traffic and mountain driving that goes with it.

The first couple hours were totally pleasant, we winded our way across route 64 east and then route 13 south, both of which were totally fine for driving the RV and had minimal traffic.

Then we hit I-70. Hello, all the humans in cars! We made pretty good time from Rifle to Vail, where we wanted to eat lunch at The Little Diner. We go there to eath almost every time we pass Vail going either direction — the food is delicious and it’s become a tradition. After some drama about parking lots being under construction (and roads and roundabouts), we were parked in a special spot for over sized vehicles and on the free bus to the diner. We made it with 10 minutes to spare before they closed and got to each our breakfast for lunch.

Back on the road, the next 2 hours were very stressful. There was rain, road construction and the right lane of the highway was insanely bumpy with ridges and uneven pavement that made it very hard to handle the RV and made everything rattle incessantly. We think it was one of the worst paved road we were on the entire trip. But we made it back to Denver and the parking gods of Cap Hill/Uptown were with us — we were able to park ON OUR BLOCK so unloading and ferrying everything into the apartment was much less painful than I was anticipating. We then thoroughly cleaned the RV (we’re both Scouts and definitely left it cleaner than we got it), unpacked and ordered Chinese for delivery.

And today, we returned the RV! We got some $$ knocked off the final bill for the black water tank drama, I supposed I could have raised more of a fuss and asked for more but I wasn’t feeling that high maintenance.

We drove 3,197 miles (an avg of 199 miles per day including the return day) through 5 states, visited 3 national parks/monuments, stayed in 9 campsites in 4 states and consumed an absurd amount of boxed mac ‘n cheese and La Croix.