Our Caravan to
Vettes On The Rockies (VOTR) 2006

Today promised to be a great day and it was.  Corvette buddy Bruce Miller and his wife Nancy along with Jim and Lauren Thomas (you'll remember these two couples from dinner last night) met us at the hotel at 9:15a:

Dan has two C5 Corvettes (a black coupe and a silver convertible); wife Priscilla got the Convertible for today:

Same shot, telephoto. Arkansas River and working railroad

Yep, whitewater rafters and kayak-ers down there, too

Here's Ron and Robin waiting for us as the tram completes the run; they chose not to go:

Oh, and they have a giant swing you can ride that sends you a hundred feet or so out over the gorge (no, thank you..):

The rest of the event was to be a 45 minute tour of the canyon rim in all the Corvettes, but it had gotten to be 2:30p and we didn't want to drive from Royal Gorge to Breckenridge in the dark -- so we took the obligatory photos of us with our Covettes:

.. and took off for Breckenridge, the last leg of the first half of our trip West.

We climbed steadily up through 11,000 feet -- and I heard an explosion from Gael's footwell!  She was asleep and it woke her up.  Boom!  Turns out we'd been carrying around an unopened bag of Tostitos corn chips since Little Rock.  The increase in altitude caused the pressure inside the sealed bag to exceed the air pressure outside and "kaboom".  Fortunately, most of the corn chips remained in the bag but there were racing hearts and footwell cleanup to come.

We reached Breckenridge about 4pm and split up to our various shelters for the week.  Tonight we dined on our own and will get together again tomorrow to explore Breckenridge (which, on first look as we drove in, looks charming).