He called me when he finally made it back to JFK last week, 5 minutes into his day off, to see if by some miracle the Jet Blue flight hadn’t left yet. I checked, and by some miracle it hadn’t even arrived in JFK! I told him the gate, and he hurried across the airport, getting to there right as they were letting everyone off. He got home at 5:30 Monday morning.

This was his one break with three days off in a row this month, so I took Tuesday off and planned our day. We drove up to Woodland Park, gassing up along the way, then headed north up 67. This is a wonderful driving road with twists and turns and few places to pass. If you’re stuck behind a group of slow-moving Harleys on the weekend, it can be miserable. But on a Tuesday morning, it was utterly empty.

At Deckers, we veered west on 126 to 285 and up through Evergreen on 73, then took back roads that Street Atlas promised would take us to Squaw Mountain Pass. It did eventually after turning to dirt and getting more and more narrow. We took Squaw Mountain Pass to Mount Evans, which is a 14er overlooking Denver.

At some point, Denver decided it needed its own highway up a 14er, since Colorado Springs already had one, so it built the Mount Evans Highway. While the Pikes Peak Highway is owned by the city of Colorado Springs and has a pretty high price tag, $35 a car, though they usually just charge us $10 a person (and if we take two Miatas, for one car), the Mount Evans Highway is a US Highway and is free, but you have to pay a recreation fee if you want to stop. They have a ranger at the entrance gate to try to talk you into paying the fee. “Well, you’ve got to keep in mind that it’s 45 minutes up and 45 minutes back. No stopping, no using the toilets, no taking photos. There are mountain goats and big horn sheep.” We told him we figured we could handle it.

The Mount Evans Highway is a beautiful drive. It isn’t nearly as steep as the Pikes Peak Highway, and it hugs the side of the mountain’s broad shoulders going up instead of switchbacking. This is useful for passing people who are driving slowly. The road is also paved all the way up. We found out why this isn’t such a good idea when we got to a high lake that was slowly draining down the mountain. The road had buckled to such an extent that the road resembled a series of monster high speed bumps. I decided the permafrost melting had to do with it. Fortunately, it didn’t last for too long before flattening out again.

The road doesn’t go all the way to the summit, like it does on Pikes Peak, so those who actually want to stand at the tippy top were snaking their way up a sidewalk to the peak. We couldn’t stop, so we just circled around the parking lot and headed back down again. We were in our t-shirts with the top down and didn’t get cold, even at 14 thousand feet, with the sun shining on us. Berck’s head was bothering him. He’s lost his acclimation to living at 6500 feet and is used to sea level now.

After descending back down, we took the other half of Squaw Mountain Pass into Idaho Springs. The diner I wanted to eat at was closed for a private party, but I had a back up plan. Berck got a delicious roast beef sandwich and I had a yummy breakfast wrap at Two Brothers Deli. Then we headed back out on the road and up the Central City Parkway to join 119. This is a beautiful but short drive up a canyon. Then we headed north on 119 up the Peak to Peak Highway. Unfortunately, there were doing some construction along there, we got stuck in a long line of cars behind a very slow cement truck doing about 20 mph. So we turned around and took a short cut up a dirt road that took us up over the ridge to the Golden Gate Canyon Road, which is another gorgeous drive. Berck was having all sorts of fun burning up my brakes.

We took 6 down to 470 and exited at 85, then veered off back on to 67 again. We’d never been on this part of 67, and I was looking forward to it. What I didn’t know is that 67 is dirt from just a ways away from Denver to just outside Deckers. About now our beautiful day had turned to Colorado afternoon rain, and we were going too slow around tight dirt mountain curves to keep the water off us! Fortunately, we were out of it soon, and it had taken the dust off the road. Much to Berck’s amazement, I think, the road finally did go somewhere, and we were back on pavement the rest of the way home.

My plan had been to drive up the Peak to Peak and through Rocky Mountain National Park, but we didn’t even make it that far. I’ll have to plan on taking some faster roads, I think, if we’re going to make it up there next time we try.