I was a little sluggish in the morning from watching The Shining right after watching The Shining on the continuous loop channel the night before.  Nothing a gigantic McDonalds coffee couldn’t fix though and I was soon in excellent shape for the morning ghost hunt.  We had signed up for a tour of the grounds that promised a chance of seeing a ghost or at least some really old furniture and we soon found ourselves surrounded by other wary tourists ready for the hunt.

We took off at a sprint before we realized everyone else was walking so we slowed down to drift back into the crowd.  Our tour guide was VERY animated and clearly had a passion for the haunting of The Stanley Hotel as she brought us around the grounds pointing out the likely hiding places of the more famous ghosts that patrol the hotel.  She also made a bold claim that someones phone or camera would lose some battery life while walking around the hotel grounds and she was not mistaken!

After the tour, we jumped in the car and headed down the road to have some lunch at a lodge and to wait for the cloud cover to burn off so we could see what the road over the mountains looked like in decent weather.

After lunch we started to make our way up the mountain and made our first stop at a nice little outlook area.  We got out of the car and I quickly pointed out a beaver I saw only to be ridiculed since we were miles away from any water, but the nice views helped to evaporate any embarrassment I had.

We hopped back in the car and continued up the mountain making lots of stops along the way to check out the different views of the rockies.  The sun didn’t stay around for long and we were treated to a couple snow squalls, but the visibility stayed ok which was a vast improvement over the drive we had yesterday that we were still recovering from.

We made it all the way to the top of the mountain that shall not be named(because I don’t know what it was) before heading back down to Estes Park and the Stanly Hotel.  We had some fancy dinner reservations to cap our last night on the road together and did not want to be late and thereby embarrass Steven King since we were representing Red Sox nation in his absence. After one of the more tastier meals of the whole trip, we strolled around the haunted grounds a little more before calling it a night.