Travel – Page 2

January 19, 2016

Visits From Nashville

We’ve had visitors from Nashville twice this month! First our friend Patrick and his adorable son Tyler came out to ski with us the first week of the year. We’ve been doing this for about as long as anyone can remember – before we lived in CO full time and certainly before any of us had kids! It’s one of our favorite traditions and something we always look forward to.

This weekend we had Matt’s sister and brother and our niece, Autumn visit for the long weekend. It’s fun to see how much Autumn is grown and nice to spend some time with everyone.

Matt picked them up from the airport late Friday while I was working with some of our besties, planning a fun roadtrip for this summer (squeeee!). We spent Saturday chilling around the house and then went out for pizza AND ice cream. Once we got back, we played some games … Ticket to Ride with the kids and then Cards Against Humanity with the adults.

Sunday we went to the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. It was unfortunately not everyone’s favorite, but Tabby and I had a nice time looking at the gems and minerals and we all enjoyed the mummies. Afterward, we came home and helped cheer the Broncos on to victory over the Steelers. It was not the most fun game to watch, but it was successful. I also went crazy and made pretzel dogs (wrapped hot dogs in Alton Brown’s Pretzel dough) and delicious paleo chili.

The kids had Monday off for MLK and so Matt and I took most of the day off as well to be with them and our guests. We (and apparently the rest of the furloughed children and adults in the area) went to our local pool to blow off some steam and then we had lunch and a lazy afternoon filled with naps, followed by finishing up homework, piano practice, making lunches, doing laundry and all those other things one has to do before the week starts.

Guess it’s our turn to head to Nashville next.

January 11, 2016

2015 in Review

2015 was in many ways an excellent year for me and mine. The second full year following Mom’s death had it’s own pitfalls and moments of sorrow, but it went on and was definitely more happy than sad.

Family

We soaked up lots of family time, skiing, hiking, camping, backpacking, cooking, walking, reading, playing and just hanging together. It’s odd – I thought things might get quieter as the kids got older – I think because I thought they’d take less of my time to manage, and they do! – but we do so much more together.

Tabby is turning into a young lady right before our very eyes. She’s worked hard at school and at home and generally has a great attitude and work ethic. She reads like it’s breathing and impresses me constantly with her artistic abilities and insights. She got her ears pierced over Christmas break after working hard for this all semester, and it makes her look even more grown up. She’s enjoying learning piano and getting pretty good and has fun with karate and swimming.

Benji is still our darling little guy. I’m so glad he’s not too big or cool to give me lots of hugs and kisses and snuggles. School can be a struggle for him with all the requirements to sit down and concentrate, but he does well academically and we’re grateful for that. At home he’s a huge ball of energy. He spends his freetime building either with legos or in Minecraft. We’ve also gotten him interested in running on the treadmill and we’re hoping to help him beat some winter blahs that way (fully supervised of course). He’s a force to be reckoned with on the slopes and so so much fun. He also had a major puncture this year, but it was of the unscheduled variety – he had his finger slammed and badly injured in a door at school and a few hours at the emergency room later and minus a fingernail, he is much improved.

Matt and I are doing our usual balancing act, making sure everyone’s fed, bills are paid and the house doesn’t look like too much of a disaster zone. We bought a second treadmill on a crazy sale in early December so we can workout together in the evenings … important because we’re training for another half marathon in April! We sneak away just the two of us whenever we can manage it – date nights when dad takes the kids or sometimes a day off when the kids are at school and occasionally, we hire a sitter to watch the kids so we can go for a run or a bike ride. It’s a nice little luxury.

Work

Matt took on a new and extended role about halfway through 2015 and it’s making him happy and keeping him busy! He goes to the office about once a week and traveling more (none of us loves this, but it’s good for him and his career).

Work has been going great for me as well. I work long hours sometimes, but usually it’s very manageable. We’ve picked up a ton of work this year and really gotten our “hit rates” up – that’s marketing speak for how often we win work. Some of it is the improving economy, I’m sure, but I fancy that some of it has to do with some cool new things we’ve been doing. Cheeeeeers!

Travel

It was a fun travel year. The coolest trip we took, was probably the surprise trip we took in May! It deserves its own post (which it never got), but I won (!!) a trip to San Francisco to go to MakerFaire! So Matt and I took off while my dad watched the kids and we flew to CA and did it up right! It was a blast!

We also had a few ski trips throughout the winter and filled up the summer with camping trips and our first ever family backpacking trip.

Our longest trip was from Denver to Nashville, with some stops along the way. We pulled the pop-up to Missouri and dropped it off at my mom’s cousin’s house. Then we went onto Nashville, spent a few days there, including a great trip to Mammoth Cave in KY, and then picked it up, took it to family reunion and came home. Exhausting, but wonderful!

We finished off the year with an amazing trip to Big Sky, Montana over Christmas to ski!

Home Improvement

We did lots of little projects around the house throughout the year. We organized our laundry room and some kitchen drawers. We did a bunch of yard work. We planted a garden.

But probably the biggest project of the year finished up right before Christmas when Matt installed our new barn door!!! He and a family friend worked for HOURS on it and it turned out so amazing. And trust me, it’s even better in person.

There are probably another load of things I could and maybe should talk about, but those are some of the highlights. It was a good year.

November 30, 2014

Giving Thanks

In a very round-about, long-story kinda way, we ended up going to Arizona for Thanksgiving. It is very rare for us to travel on Thanksgiving and honestly, it wasn’t numero uno on my to-do-list. I’ve been working like a rented mule and driving 10 hours twice over 4 days (as opposed to lying around in our jim jams for four days) didn’t sound awesome, but we had the opportunity to see my dad’s sisters and their husbands and it really doesn’t happen often, so we went for it.

The trip out was happily quite uneventful. We made quite a few stops thanks to driving with six people two of whom were small kids with small bladders.

The scenery south of Colorado Springs into Arizona through New Mexico is not my favorite, but we got to see some cool things, including some “Javiers” or cacti as normal folk call them.

We got in super late on Wednesday and had dinner at my aunt’s house. The kids were falling asleep at the table, but rallied nicely the next morning for Thanksgiving. We had a nice day together with breakfast and cooking and thanksgivings. And really, that’s how most of our time in AZ went. It was lovely hanging out with some family that I hardly ever see and seeing old photos and hearing some new old family stories. Ben and Tabby had a nice time getting to know some of that branch of the family too.

One highlight for me was getting to try out the brand new Rummoli board I made just before we left for AZ. Since I didn’t have time to gather up poker chips, we used glass marbles, which worked great in a pinch!

But the big highlight for the kids was our critter encounter. My aunt and uncle had bid on and won a critter encounter from a reptile rescue at an auction the summer. So the critters came to visit on Friday afternoon. Both my kids are big into animals and this was an extra special treat.

Ben’s favorite was this baby box turtle, Benny, who not only shares his name, but is also the pet he is very desirous of.

My personal favorite was this super chill iguana named Tamale (because apparently they use iguana meat for tamales!) and Tabby’s was this pair of cool geckos, one of which is perched on Ben’s head.

It was great because of the small group, the kids could really hang out with the animals. They just wondered around with us. I was less fond of this with the snakes, but I loved the tortoise (Sequoia) and Iguana. It was such a cool thing for the kids. What a treat!

Heading home early Saturday morning was a trial for all, especially this bed hog (his sister is pictured as well if you can find her!), but we made it. And now we’re spending the last day of break mostly just chilling.

September 11, 2014September 9, 2014

Camping at Dillon

We headed out last weekend for what we think is probably our last camping trip of the year (maybe one more? we’ll see!).

Right up until that morning, we didn’t know if we were going because the weather looked grim. We had a family back out and others were talking about it. Plus two families needed to come up late and another needed to leave early leaving us kind of iffy, but we decided to press on and go for it.

Between moving and school and work, it wasn’t one of our more organized efforts. I also went waaay bare bones on everything from clothes to food. We ate dinner in Dillon on Friday night, leaving me needing three meals + cereal and milk on Sunday morning. I just did a bunch of chili, some sandwiches and easy eggs. We didn’t even take a cooler – just filled the little fridge in the pop up. The simple was nice and I want to do more of it.

Friday night we arrived and got a fire going. Just one other family showed up before bedtime but we had a great little fire going and all sat around reading Little House on the Prairie (our current read-aloud book). It was so apropos to the setting and everyone really enjoyed it. The kids went to bed right about the time another family showed up so we had 6 adults for our late night campfire and wine drinking.

The next day, we randomly chose a hike off a google search and unlike the weekend before, this one was gorgeous! Perfect distance, perfect difficulty, and gorgeous views everywhere!

The destination (1.6 miles in) was Lily Pad Lake which as you can see, lived up to its name.

But along the way, we found beautiful meadows, scenic vistas and this totally random field of rocks. We were all pretty sure the trolls were going to pop up any moment and start singing “He’s a bit of a fixer upper!”

We even had lovely tree cover and sweet little bridges meaning no one ever got too hot or had to jump streams.

Best of all, the kids were AWESOME hikers. There was little complaining and they sang songs and did math problems and were super fun the whole time. We all feel like our hard work is paying off. They’re FUN!

After the hike, we went back, had lunch and spent the rest of the day chilling at the campsite. The two remaining families showed up and their kids joined our kids, running in their pack. Dinner, more reading around the campfire, some marshmallows and late night adult fun and it was over. We had to pack up early the next morning to get ready for our week and our Sunday night guests.

It all went too quickly … not just this camping trip, but the whole summer. Maybe we will try to sneak one more trip in ….

September 10, 2014September 9, 2014

Weekend in Vail

We went to Vail for Labor Day Weekend. Owing to moving and camping and LIFE, we had not been there since ski season, and since I actually like it better in the summer, I was happy when my sister proposed we go.

After a long fight with traffic, we got there and crashed.

The next morning, we tried to go to Hanging Lake to hike, but there weren’t any parking spots!!! At 9 am!! yeesh.

So we found another hiking spot in nearby Glenwood. It really wasn’t our favorite and didn’t have much to recommend it besides some pretty wildflowers ….

And a nice view of Glenwood. Not much tree cover, near a water treatment plant, pretty meh. But that’s OK.

We had a nice lunch at The Pullman, a charmingly casual but very nice restaurant in Glenwood Springs. Dad and I split a peach bourbon BBQ pork sandwich. Yum.

Afterward, we drove on to Paonia (just 1.5 hours away!) and went peach picking at this cool little farm.

The peaches were GORGEOUS! We bought 35 lbs of them.

The kids had a wonderful time running around outside …

And playing on the cart …

And hanging with Daddy

And checking out the grapes.

They make wine there too and the grapes were looking good!

They also grow flowers, more fruit, a ton of veggies and apples! Wish it were just around the corner instead of 4 hours away (from Denver).

They definitely had the “cute farm” thing down, complete with vintage truck for Ben to drive.

We saw this beautiful little water fall on the side of the road on the way back to Vail and had to stop and check it out. It was a very cool hidden gem. We got back to Vail late after having dinner at Moe’s Original BBQ in Eagle and played games and chilled.

The next day, we had a leisurely morning and picked up Matt’s brother who was in a nearby town for a wedding. Then we had the birthday lunch at Mountain Standard in Vail. This is a sister restaurant to one of our other local favorites, Sweet Basil. We had super super yummy food an exchanged gifts and had dessert. We all agreed we didn’t have to eat for a long time to come.

After lunch, we took a walk to Betty Ford Garden which is crazy beautiful no matter the season.

We got some family shots of the four of us, none of which turned out, despite the fact that my sister snapped 20!! Seriously, they’re all either out of focus or I someone is looking off to the side or something. Grr.

But I snapped this one of everyone else and it’s pretty nice, despite Ben’s goofiness.

A little more chilling and it was time to head home and back to our regularly scheduled lives. Ah well.

July 9, 2014

South Dakota Here We Come

Well I had no idea that when we tentatively planned a trip to South Dakota for 4th of July weekend that my kids would be SO into it. We didn’t know when we’d be closing on the house, so we booked a cheap campsite with the intention of backing out (and only incurring a $20 fee) if we needed to stay close to home. What I didn’t know was that there was NO WAY my kids were missing out on seeing Mt Rushmore. Seriously!

Anyhow, so as July 3rd dawned, we piled in the car and towed the pop-up to South Dakota. It’s 6 hours away and unfortunately, most of that 6 hours is a super desolate drive through Wyoming. Population 12. With 2 gas stations. And no where to eat.

Continue reading “South Dakota Here We Come”

June 30, 2014July 1, 2014

Scenes from the Beach

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind since we got back from our Florida/New Olreans vacation. Fo sho.

But that’s not entirely why I haven’t written about it. A tragedy occurred while we were in Florida with our Nashville family – Matt’s Dad, stepmom, sister, niece and brother. My sister-in-law’s ex-husband and father of their beautiful daughter died suddenly a few days into our trip. It’s a sort of an “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” kind of situation. The tragedy trumped everything and we were bound in place, trying to sort things out and cope. And yet there were three little people all but incapable of understanding and still very much at the beach wanting to have fun so we went on.

And I don’t want to let go of the many nice memories of the trip we had. So here are a few of them.

Continue reading “Scenes from the Beach”

June 4, 2014

Camping at Leadville Salida

We had a call a few weeks ago – our third annual group camping trip to Turquoise Lake near Leadville was off! The campground couldn’t be open thanks to some crazy late season snow storms we’d had. Boo!

My co-conspirator and I scrambled to come up with an alternative, but group campsites that allow trailers and weren’t too far away and were AVAILABLE on very short notice weren’t numerous. One to be exact – Angel of Shavano. So we sent out a message to the group – Change in plans -still interested? They were.

And so that is how we found ourselves trekking down hwy 285 again, this time towards Salida. This is a crazy beautiful part of the state with mountains all around and lush greenery. Of course the picture above really only shows the mountains, but as you’ll see later, it’s LUSH.

We had many of our usual suspects joining us – 8 families in all, including the parents of one parent and my sister. Most of us have trailers, but a couple brave ones tent it. I personally had my fill of sleeping on the ground in my youth and for me, a tent is reserved now for when you absolutely can’t bring the trailer. It rained off and on, just light drizzly rain and we were very glad for the trailers then. We were even gladder when a large black bear decided to come visit. Large as in about 500 lbs. He was not interested in us though, just the dumpster. My friend, the other Jess, and some of the dads chased him away. I didn’t even get to see him in person – I’d gone to town for provisions (Doritos and liquor).

Mostly, we hung out around the campsite. Did I mention it was gorgeous?

A beautiful little stream ran through our campsite and it took the kids about 2 seconds to get their feet wet. Luckily it wasn’t chilly and since it’s CO, they dried overnight. They run around in packs or sub packs. Much fun was to be had finding bugs and inventing games. They even found a very large garter snake – which makes it overall a pretty small snake – they had to poke at.

On Saturday we took a couple of hikes – one as a big group, and one with just the moms.

It was definitely worth the hike!

Back at camp, we ate giant s’mores

And had way too much fun.

It was a great weekend, but even if it had rained the entire time, it would have been great – because we got to hang out with really great people.

May 13, 2014May 12, 2014

Back to the Dunes

We spent the weekend at what is undoubtedly my favorite places in Colorado – The Great Sand Dunes. I never get over how cool it is to find a GIANT pile of sand in the middle of the Rockies, brought together by a perfect storm of mountain placement and winds. And I think I love it even more now that we visit it as part of a camping trip. Continue reading “Back to the Dunes”

March 26, 2014

Weekend, Moving, Etc.

We took the opportunity spring break presented to take a nice little trip to Vail with some family friends. We had 3 families of four plus my cousin who came along to provide child-minding services and my sister who came along because she’s a bit crazy.

We went up late on Thursday and skied Friday as a big group, Saturday as just the adults and Sunday again as a big group. Out of the six kids along, 4 can ski pretty darn well and we had them all over the mountain. Greens, blues, even a couple of blacks. They are getting good and are such troopers.

Of course after a long day of skiing, they generally looked like this. But then we could go back, lounge, have dinner and good conversation.

Everyone was great about picking up slack, sharing, tidying up and all the other stuff you want in travel companions. My cousin was awesome to watch them and give us some good breaks. It was lovely and relaxing.

So naturally we came home to crazy and stressful. We left mid-day on Monday and after a brief stop at our rental house, went back to our old house to do final pack-up. The movers arrived at 8am yesterday and worked until almost 7pm including stops at our storage unit and our rental house. We now have dressers, actual beds for the kids, a patio set (our only dining table) and a small subset of Matt’s woodshop.

After the movers left, we headed back over to our old ‘hood. After a crazy day and officially downsizing to 800sf, we really needed to see progress on our new house … and it’s looking great! Then we went to have dinner in our favorite neighborhood spot and pick up the tools we needed to assemble the kids beds so they’d have somewhere to sleep! We brought home two sleeping kids and put them in our bed and then stayed up until late getting their bunkbeds assembled.