A Jeep Tour Through Colorado’s Million Dollar Highway And Highway To Heaven

When traveling through Colorado, one city I highly recommend visiting is the little known Ouray. Here, you’ll not only get to take part in various adventure sports, sip beer at quirky breweries and eat scrap cookies at Mouse’s, you’ll also be able to take a scenic jeep tour through Colorado’s Million Dollar Highway and Highway To Heaven.

When visiting Ouray, I took my jeep tour with San Juan Scenic Jeep Tours, a company I highly recommend. Our guide was funny, knowledgeable and full of interesting stories about the area and its history. The tour began with a viewing of part of the famous Million Dollar Highway, a scenic road thought to be one of the most dangerous in the United States due to its narrowness, steep cliffs and lack of guardrails. The road supposedly gets its name from a woman known as Queen Anne, who once said, “You couldn’t give me a million dollars to ride on that road again!” About halfway through the route, the tour makes a turn onto the beautiful Highway To Heaven, a picturesque path that takes you to an elevation of 13,000 feet. For a final stop, the tour visits an old ghost town in Ouray County.

For a more visual idea of the experience, check out the gallery below.

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[Image above via Vagabondish. Gallery images via Jessie on a Journey and Davepaper]

Free Geekery: Travel with a Quirky Edge

There are 19 museums, most of them free, in Beaumont, Texas. Who knew? I didn’t until I read 20 (Inexpensive) Nerd Getaways at Free Geekery, a website that devotes time to cheap travel and unusual jaunts. This article covers a vacation assortment with creative, quirky and brainy sounding angles–even cruise ship travel. Insight Cruises, dubbed Geek Cruises, offer relatively inexpensive technology conferences on cruise ships. While you head to Alaska or Hawaii, for example, you can browse the Internet, learn about the latest technology wonders, and mix and mingle with techno wizards in between browsing the buffet table or whatever else one does on a cruise.

One vacation that caught my attention was #10. Engineer Your Way into Paradise. This is a driving option, although, I thought it was train related from the title. The tour takes you along US 550, “The Million Dollar Highway,” through some of the mountain passes of Colorado. I’ve been on this road and the sections mentioned are the kind that make you clutch the wheel if you’re driving. The payoff is GORGEOUS scenery-the kind that compels you turn in your seat-if you’re not driving so that you can hold onto the vistas a bit longer.

The other 17 trips are such a mix of themes that each has its own unique flavor and worth a taste. Hopefully, more travel tidbits will be coming our way. The website also has other handy travel related articles like how to get the most out of airline miles and gas mileage.