Rounding up a Ranch

So after we decided that, yeah, a trip to a ranch would make a nice summer trip, I had to set about finding one for us. I knew it had to be in Colorado, so that made the task a little less daunting, but what next? We didn't really know anyone who had been to one, we didn't want to go on a cattle drive with Curly and I didn't know any travel agents who specialized in ranches, so how could I find someplace for us?

Well, of course, my first step was to google "ranch vacation." The first listing was for Ranchweb.com, which looked like a good starting place. I went to their interactive map for Colorado. Oh no, that's a lot of ranches - 45 or so!! Now what to do. Okay, let's figure out a way I can narrow them down a bit. First requirement, after horses - it has to have a swimming pool for Rebecca. When she isn't riding, she will want to swim since that is her number one favorite activity. And, of course, we have to be somewhere near where we might see those sheep. Ali doesn't want to ride a horse, he wants to ride his aluminum (aluminium for the Brits) steed, his Klein mountain bike, so we have to be someplace where he can do that. I decided we also wanted someplace reasonably convenient so we wouldn't spend half our vacation getting there. Since we can get direct flights from Boston to Denver, I decided that we needed to be within a couple of hours of Denver.

Ranchweb.com's search engine wasn't quite doing it for me - it wasn't narrowing the ranches down enough with the search criteria they provided so I went back to Google and tried some other searches. First, I tried "Colorado ranches" and the first place listed was the Colorado Dude and Guest Ranch Association, which sounded like a good place to look. Okay, it had a lot of the ones from Ranchweb.com but not all of them. It did at least let me use mountain biking as a search criteria, which narrowed their list from 30 to 14 ranches but I was worried that some ranches were missing from this site. I ended up using both Ranchweb.com and the Colorado site to visit web sites for the listed ranches that came close to having what we wanted. Only 2 really seemed to make the cut for us - Peaceful Valley and the Lane Guest Ranch. It was almost a toss-up. But, we chose Lane Guest Ranch for a couple of reasons - it was closer to the Rocky Mountain National Park, listed mountain biking as one of its activities and even had its own we could use, and they made a point of being vegetarian friendly - something that makes both Rebecca and me happy. So, we rented a 2 bedroom cabin (bunk beds for Rebecca, which she loves) with a hot tub on our porch. And, tomorrow we are off on our adventure.

Did I make the right choice? We'll see. But, we all agreed that this is going to be one great vacation - Rebecca and I have our horses, Ali can ride his mountain bike, and that area offers some pretty spectacular scenery. Add a pool, private hot tub, and hopefully some sheep or at least some other wildlife and we can't think of a better way to spend a week in August.