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At the Lake Again

Once again we abandoned hearth and home and headed for the hills this weekend. My uncle’s family had our family, my mom and sister, and a couple of other families we work with up to his lake house for the weekend. You could have not asked for better company or a more beautiful location to spend the weekend. We had a wonderful time.

On the way up we drove through Rocky Mountain National Park which is just sheer gorgeous everything. We took in amazing vistas (the kids slept, so we did not stop for photos) and heading out of the park (the kids were awake by this time) we had a couple of moose encounters.

Once at my uncle & aunt’s house, the big fun began. There were five kids altogether and they spent the whole weekend running amuck in the back yard

… That is when they weren’t out on the water. We went tubing and canoeing and it’s hard to say which Tabby enjoyed more. Ben was all about the big boat.

With everyone pitching in on meals and cleanup and the like, it was pretty low stress and maximum chill. My cousin and her friend (both gifted musicians) treated us to a mini concert and the wine flowed freely. But of course, we had to head home and back to reality. The kids were glad to see their beds and we were glad to pick up Loki.

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Camping!

I won’t lie. I’m a bit stressed at the moment. Things in our house keep breaking, including our A/C and I’m supposed to be hosting Bunco on Thursday. But I won’t think about that right now … I will think about our first camping trip and how well it went.

We went to the lovely Poudre Canyon, home to the Cache la Poudre River, Continue reading “Camping!”

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The Pop-Up Has Landed

Last night while I was slaving away over a hot stove making the kids some fried rice for dinner and cleaning up the house, Matt was picking up our new (to us) pop-up camper.

It is a nice 12′ size with sleeping room for 8 (if most of those sleeping are kids). We put it up and put it down and it was pretty easy and quick. Hopefully soon we can stock it up and hit the road. We’d like to get a couple trips in before the weather starts getting too cool, possibly to The Great Sand Dunes. Matt also has designs on a trip to the western slope to do some apple and peach picking.

But of course before we can do any of that we need to get it all stocked up and ready to go. I think that will be a project for the weekend. And I’m hoping this will be a wonderful way to get the kids out into nature and spend time together as a family!

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The Definition of Insanity

My maternal grandpa’s family has family reunions every 2 years. We flip-flop between a location in the Rockies (near us) and a location in Missouri (near the other branches of family). They started when I was a baby and have been going strong for 30 years. I have been to almost all of them. My mom and a few others, every one.

This year’s family reunion was on the schedule as one of our bi-weekly weekend trips. It was the last weekend in July, or so the calendar said. Friday afternoon, around 3:30, I was at home waiting for a friend of mine and her little girl to arrive for a playdate when my mom called. “I’m sick, Jess,” she said. I figured she was referring to a stomach virus or something that would take her out of commission for Tabby’s beloved Friday Movie Night. But then she went on.

“Reunion is THIS weekend.”

Tabby at Dinner amongst her people

That’s right … the summer of calendar mishaps and idiocy continues. We as a group had collectively gotten it into our heads that reunion was a weekend later than it actually was. Now the reunion was to be held near Warsaw, MO, about 10.5 hours from Denver, or about 2 hours from the nearest airport if you could get yourself on a plane. But of course, a quick check of flights revealed that it was both cost-prohibitive and a scheduling nightmare.

We were all really bummed. We only get to see our extended family in short spells every once in a while. It’s not that we can’t see them at other times but there’s a pretty large contingent and so a reunion is excellent visiting value. Beyond that you hate to miss out on something that’s part of the collective group’s history. So we started scheming. The biggest hurdle was my grandma. She has perfect reunion attendance and we were very much looking forward to bringing her with us, but at 88 years old she has a walker and is on full-time oxygen. Between the combination of the two (well not the walker so much as the reasons for the walker) we simply couldn’t figure out any way to get her to the reunion in time.

Once we came to terms with that, we assessed whether or not the rest of us should/could go. Ultimately we decided we could … and we would. So playdate over (all this transpired in phone calls and mom coming to my house in about an hour as the playdate was going on), I set the land-speed record for packing and got us ready to go in about half an hour. Trip all over I can say in all honesty that I did an excellent job. The only thing I forgot was a swim-diaper for Ben.

We met up at my mom’s house and piled clown-car style into my mom’s SUV, using up 6 of 7 seats. My dad was off fishing in Wyoming with a buddy and we had no way to get in touch with him and so left him fishing. We left at 6:30 pm on Friday and made it to Salina, KS and a very nice Courtyard Marriot by 2:15 AM. After a paltry 3-4 hours of sleep, we left Salina by 7 AM the next morning and made it to “Camp” by 11 AM.

Reunion was what reunion always is, organized chaos. People in the lake and pool, people in the meeting room, mixer games, awesome group meals, playing games ’til way too late, lots of fun and laughs and photo-taking. My kids got to meet their age-mates, 5th or 6th cousins (had to sketch out a partial family tree on some scratch paper to figure that out) that are the children of my age-mates. My kids slept in a queen

Lil' Skipper

(double?) bed with my mom and Matt and I shared a twin bed. Sleep was scanty and light, but that’s hardly the point.

We learned that it was definitely worth the effort. And we were very glad we went. Unfortunately, we still had to drive across Kansas once more.

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Ode to Kansas

Wide. Long. FLAT.
Road stretches straight forever,
or at least hundreds of miles.

Hundreds of miles that all
LOOK THE SAME,
Stand between us and anywhere east.

Speed limit only 75,
We wish for a wormhole,
but settle for fast music and caffeine.

422 miles along I-70.
How many more ’til Taco John’s?

Continue reading “Ode to Kansas”

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Weekend Hiking

Bear with me, because this is going to be a longish post. But there are pictures! So that makes it quicker, right?

Saturday we went on probably the most beautiful hike I’ve ever done. Hanging Lake is located near Glenwood Canyon about an hour west of Vail. The canyon itself is absolutely breathtaking. The fierce Colorado river runs through cliff walls of variegated red stone that go straight up. This year we have had tons of rain and quite a bit of run-off and the river was crazy high and had some amazing rapids.

To get to the trail head you have to get off the highway and then go back the opposite direction (East) and get off again. The trailhead has very nice facilities including water and bathrooms and vending machines and a big parking lot. The trail itself starts out flat, wide and paved. It’s pretty deceiving.

Continue reading “Weekend Hiking”

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Pop-Up Camping

My husband, in certain lights, greatly resembles a pit bull. No, not in looks, but in tenacity. I guess it’s the hunter in him – the single minded must get the mammoth sort of roots. It is a fine quality in many regards. I’m sure it serves him well at work and in hobbies. But there is one arena in which it is kind of irritating to deal with.

Large purchases. When Matt is desirous of something (and he always is, serially), he researches it within an inch of its life. He weighs pros and cons. He gets opinions from all who have opinions to offer and he discusses it with me ad nauseum.

Obviously this has its benefits. He makes good decisions. But the interim can be a bit hard to live with. I will frequently make moratoriums when I can’t stand it anymore and he won’t be allowed to talk to me about it for a day or face my wrath. I have also cut deals with the devil and acquiesced to a purchase with the understanding that I don’t have to hear about tools or cars or whatever for a certain period of time (and he is also not allowed to purchase them).

Right now he is latched on to pop-up trailers. It’s a subject we go back and forth on. I love the look and function of tear-drop trailers and would love in many ways to have one, but storage space and cost prevent me. We both like the idea of being able to more easily camp with the family; having a setup that would hold all our gear and bedding so we just have to add food and clothes for a weekend away is super appealing. But tear-drops are very expensive. You can build your own, but it’s a big process that might be fun if we had a bit more time, but we don’t. And it’s still expensive. They also generally only sleep two, though you can find some that sleep four. Once again, expensive.

Pop-up campers are a natural because they do this but at a more reasonable price and in addition they also sleep more people than a tear-drop or small travel trailer. Some will even fit in our garage. So we’ve looked at new ones. Matt has been scouring Craigslist. And we’ve been talking about it for a few weeks. Spending a big chunk of change always puts me on edge, but part of me is tempted because we would like to camp more and this is a good way to do it and it would also put this whole thing to rest. Only slightly kidding.

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A Long Strange Trip

So a funny thing happened on the way to the airport. Well I guess technically it was the days leading up to our flight. Matt’s stepmom mentioned something about our flight being at 10AM. I knew it was a morning flight and this seemed about right to me, though I thought it was a smidge earlier. But when we checked in online and printed our boarding passes the night before both Matt and I looked at our flight times and sure enough … right there it said 10:49am.

Upon arriving at the airport, we tried to log in and check our bags and got errors. The clerk informed us after some back-and-forth that our flight was actually at 9 AM and we had just missed (by minutes, I swear!!) our cutoff for putting our luggage on the flight, and ourselves as well it seems. No amount of cajoling, crying, etc. mattered. We could NOT get on that flight. Since we’d already checked in and it was just a matter of our bags, it was pretty irritating, especially since, as I noted later, they’re happy for your bags to be on a different flight if it suits them, but if you make the mistake, you are screwed.

Quadrupling our mistake was the fact that we were 1) a family of four 2) flying on a holiday weekend. Standby was not much of an option since they predicted they could get us on basically one at a time, maybe two. And the idea of hanging out in the airport all weekend to see who stupidly missed their flight (like us) with two little kids already at the end of their vacation rope was not much appealing. We could also pay fare-difference and fly as a family on Monday for around $600, but as we were already packed up and ready to go, heading back to Matt’s parents’ house, unpacking, etc. etc. was pretty depressing, especially since we’d miss the whole weekend and all the time we needed to get ready to go back to work.

We checked out other airlines which were either entirely unavailable or ridiculous (thousands for us to fly on such short notice, one-way). So we hit on a slightly crazy idea … rent a car and drive back. For around $400 (though I think once all fees, etc. were paid, it was closer to $500) we could rent a car, drive back and be home the next day. It wasn’t a cheaper option, but it was in many ways a more palatable option. We’ve done the trip many times before and it’s all easy-interstate. Everything was packed and we could just go from the airport and head out.

So … we did. We did a long stop-over in Paducah, KY for lunch at a Chick-fil-A with a play center and a stop at Walmart for various other provisions. $90 netted us a portable DVD player with two screens and that plus the $10 copy of Scooby Doo, Where are You?? we picked up, plus some various other bribes, kept the kids happy for MANY hours. We grabbed some road-trip food and an insulated bag so we had snacks. We made stops here and there for traffic and gas and … POTTY/diaper breaks.

We made our best time after rush hour and when the kids were sleeping, so we pushed through to Hays, KS and stayed at the dubious Days Inn, home of the worst shower I’ve ever had. The next day after our continental breakfast and another 5 hours in the car, we finally made it to the Denver International Airport and returned our car.

Matt and I are both still FLOORED at how amazing the kids were. Of course possibly watching mommy lose her sh*t in the Nashville Airport impressed upon them the gravity of the situation. Or maybe they were so engrossed in Scooby Doo they just didn’t care. But they were amazingly good. The road trip overall was kind of fun in a weird way. It felt sort of like we were back in college again and someone had dropped two unsuspecting children into our back seat.

Of course it’s much easier to be Zen about all this now, but we definitely made some lemonade and dealt with the situation pretty well. As we kept saying, it could have been much worse. We decided there were four people on standby who needed to get to Denver for whatever reason much more urgently than us. And we’ve got 4 flight credits on Frontier for our next trip. That said, not something I’m keen to do again in a big hurry.

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Nashville, Baby!

So we were gone last week. My good girl side wanted to pre-write a bunch of stuff and let it post automatically while I was gone, but my get real side revolted when she realized how much packing she still had to do. Packing up 3 people to head off on vacation (Matt packs himself, of course) is no joke. Neither is getting to the airport and wrangling all of the crap (giant carseats). But usually after I get all of it squared away, I can kick back and more-or-less enjoy vacation.

Such was the case with our Nashville trip. We left Denver on Thursday and got in very late. Friday we spent the day with Matt’s mom and caught up with a friend from Matt’s childhood and his family.

Saturday we left for Gatlinburg, TN, gateway to the Smokies, with Matt’s step mom, Sherrie, and his siblings and his sister’s husband. We checked out Cherokee, NC (tourist trap), rode go-karts, went to Dollywood, went hiking, checked out Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge (tourist traps again) and generally had a nice time, however hot and sticky it was.

We got back into town mid-day on Wednesday and the kids were DONE with being in the car (it’s about 5 hours from Nashville to Gatlinburg). They had fun running around Matt’s parents’ house and got good naps before we went to dinner with some good friends and their darling new baby.

Thursday we met up with Matt’s mom again for breakfast at the Pfunky Griddle. There are griddles in the middle of the table and you get unlimited pancake batter and cook them up yourself adding whatever selection of toppings you’d like. They also had delicious mashed potatoes that you could grill into potato pancakes. Super good. We also explored that area which has many new and interesting shops. The kids got home in time for naps and got to spend the evening with their grandparents while we went to dinner with friends and enjoyed a quiet kid-free evening.

Friday we headed off to the airport early … and that is where it gets interesting. I’ll save the rest for tomorrow. More photos here.

 

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Summer at the Lake

Well you know from yesterday what went into getting away from the weekend, but I shared nothing about the weekend itself. It was fabulous to say the least.

My mom’s brother and his family recently built a new vacation home in the mountains about 1.5-2 hours away from Denver. They had all of us (my parents, sister, grandma, Matt and the kids and myself) up to see it and enjoy a great weekend away. The house is beautiful and the company could not have been better.

Tabby and Ben both had a wonderful time. Tabby’s favorite thing was riding in the Rhino ATV my uncle has up there. The both loved the boat, but Ben in particular had a great time DRIVING the boat. In general, they both loved being outside and taking in nature. We saw a fox from the house, a bald eagle while we were on the boat, and as we came back through Rocky Mountain National Park, a moose and her calf, a bunch of deer and lots of elk. Matt and I enjoyed the leisurely pace of the mountains and also all the extra adult hands around, eager to snuggle our kids.

We’re very lucky to have such a nice extended family nearby.