The Planning

The total mileage is 1696 from my home Dallas to Estes Park, CO and is going to be 13 hours 15 minutes. We need to overnight in middle of the journey so, we choose budget hotel somewhere in Pablo CO. After that we will be headed to Denver,CO if possible for lunch before we continue our last stop to Estes Park as we need to get the permit before we can overnight camping at the park for two nights. By the way, we need to call them two days ahead before we came.  We going to have our dinner at the park and then go to sleep for tomorrow. We going to have a breakfast before we start out hiking. Then we going to stay overnight again before we go back home tomorrow. Then after have our breakfast on the next day, then we will start our journey to home and then overnight at Amarillo,NM before continuing our journey. 

The car rental and mileage

To save mileage for our car, the best option is to rent the car from Enterprise. Total cost for deposit and taxes included is gonna be 200 dollar and the gas cost is around 200 dollars. Thanks to Obama for the low gas prices now. 

The lodging

It is impossible for me to drive all the way to Estes Park, so we have to overnight somewhere in the middle of the journey. For this trip, we already made the reservation for two hotel in Pablo and Amarillo. The total cost for both hotel is 92 dollar.

The food

We are going to do fishing over there and just bring some protein snack, fruits and some raw eggs. We need to buy the UV filter water as we going to get the water from the waterfall at the park.

The camping gear preparation

Well, because this is gonna be our first time of camping and hiking, we do not have any of those gear and any experience at all except when we were young. So for the mental preparation, we look at others video on YouTube who teach us how to camping and the preparation of the gear and due to tight budget, we have to do more research on the gear that we need to bring on. Over there, they do have the camping gear for rental, but we decided to buy it because the cost of rent and to buy is almost the same and also we can keep the stuff for our next adventure. After done some researches ,these are the list that we bought from online and at the store nearby:( Please watch the video below). Some of item like hiking shoes which is not included here is because we do not need it because we already have one. All item just basic item that you might needed during your camping. So feel free to bring along what ever u think is necessary for you.