Road Trip to Colorado

We just got back home from our road trip to Colorado. We had a great trip! It's about a 20 hour drive from Birmingham so we split it up into to days. The first night we stopped in Kansas City. KC was nice it had some very modern architecture and was larger than I imagined. We had dinner at a vegetarian restaurant called Fud. It is a small place in a cute neighborhood and it is cash only.
It is always exciting when we can go to a vegetarian restaurant because it is nice to have choices and be able to order anything on the menu. Fud has a large menu and it was hard to decide but we settled on the Jalapeno Fritters as a appetizer, The Smoke Stack sandwich, and the Jack BBQ sandwich.

Everything was amazing! We really hope we get to go back sometime soon. This was the first time we had jack fruit and just amazed by the taste and texture they were able to create with it. 

The second day was spent driving through Kansas which is pretty flat and open with long stretches of nothing except fields of crops, lots of wheat, fields of cattle, and fields of very large windmills.  
As we drove into Colorado's front range the mountains came into view. We ran into a little traffic near Bolder but not a bad drive that day.
We spent one night in Bolder checked out a few breweries and had a late dinner at Leaf. We were totally in heaven marveling at the fact that we were able to have dinner at vegetarian restaurants two nights in a row on our road trip. Leaf was a lot fancier than Fud and we both chose to do the three course option. For the first course we picked a Basil Gnocchi and Mushroom Pate. Sorry the photos are a little dark because we ate outside on the patio enjoying the nice weather.
For the main course we had a mushroom polenta dish that was on the daily special and the Smoked Beet Fettuccine with crispy cauliflower.
Then for dessert a Vegan Apple Crisp and Vegan Carrot Cake.
Then we spent most of the rest of the week in the Rocky Mountain National Park. We did a lot of hiking and went elk watching. The higher elevations did make hiking a little more challenging. A few of the hikes we picked only had a modest elevation gain of 500 feet but at 10,000 feet it was much different than the elevation we are used to in Birmingham which is only around 600 feet. Here are a few pictures from the park. I will try to post a few more hiking photos later.