One of the events that we’d had on our schedule for months was the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. It’s one of the biggest bluegrass festivals in the country and has an awesome vibe. It’s a four day festival but we only got to go on Sunday. The sun was shining, the scenery was beautiful, the beer was flowing, and the music was great. We liked it so much, we decided to spend a week right in the middle of town at the town park campground.

The campground was by far the best “in-town” campground we’ve ever stayed at. It was walking distance from downtown, yet was still surrounded by a huge park and it wasn’t just a field where they cram rigs in as close as possible. It had no hookups which really helped keep the worst of the RV crowd out too! 😉 It was kinda expensive ($28/night plus an additional $10/night for having two vehicles) but we paid the same in Ouray the next week for a much less nice site (though we did have hookups in Ouray).

The campground also happened to be right next to a ten foot waterfall and a beautiful canyon.

We also had some great views of the mountains there too.

About the time we moved in I started falling in love with this town. The views were amazing in every direction. The people were nice. The creek through town was perfect for tubing and SUPing and had a couple play waves I could kayak on. The beer was great (including at the liquor store where they had a great selection of 6-packs AND bombers that rotated year round). And there were so many things to do outside all year round. Allison used the public pool. We did some mountain biking and hiking and played frisbee golf (note though, while frisbee golf sounds low impact, it happens to put a ton of stress on injured knees. Allison ended up really hurting herself on the 3rd hole so she had to take it easy for a few days),  I wanted to move there forever. If only rent wasn’t so ridiculous. (Editor’s note: I thought Telluride was cool, but had a pretentious vibe I did NOT like. I wouldn’t want to live there, personally. -Allison)

One of the first days we were there, I got a special treat. For my birthday a few months before, Allison had gotten me a tandem paragliding flight. I was really excited because I used to skydive a lot but I hadn’t done it in close to ten years and I’d always wanted to get into paragliding. So at 8 am, I hopped on the in-town gondola with the instructor and climbed 1600 vertical feet to the top of a ski slope. We climbed into our gear and then ran off a mountain. 🙂

Did I mention the gondola? Telluride has the best public transit system ever because everything is by gondola. And it’s amazing! The birds sing, the trees glow, the mountains are majestic and the sunsets are stunning:

One of the last days we were there, I wanted to get some sunset photography in and the valley was beautiful, so I climbed up here:

and started snapping away:

It was a great way to end a fantastic week. I hope we get to go back soon (if not move there forever)!