Colorado! Part 2

Picking up where I left off in Part 1, we arrived exhausted but giddy, and set about exploring our rental house. The rest of that first day was a blur. Over the next day or so, I managed to get groceries (Ouch! expensive in the mountains, and I didn't have the time or energy to go all the way back to Colorado Springs. Still, cheaper than eating out.) We spent most of those first few days just getting settled and exploring our new environment.

Natalie and Rachel love the soft-headed grass growing out in the yard.

Bobby and I road-tested the hiking carrier. After a few adjustments, it's working well for us.

Here's the rest of our tribe, all of us heading down to the two neighborhood lakes.

The two lakes are connected by a narrow stream slithering through the grassy bank. There were several places to cross via rocks or simple board bridges. The kids loved this stream and were pretending to fish in it.

Natalie and Rachel took over the photography, and got some good close-ups.

Ian didn't want to be left out of the photo fun. After grabbing my phone, he took about 43 pictures of the inside of his hand.

They have a gas grill, and this chicken and squash turned out great.

There were bubbles. There will probably be more bubbles.

The 2-acre property includes a great multi-level playscape and a trampoline. I have mixed feelings about trampolines, but the kids are crazy about them.

Day 4 was July 4th, Independence Day here in the U.S. We drove to the nearest town with grocery stores, the charming hamlet of Woodland Park, which happens to be celebrating its 125th anniversary  this year. They were having a festival, the weather was drop-dead gorgeous, the big inflatable slide was free, and a symphony was playing in a big bandstand facing a grassy hill, with Pikes Peak in the background. It was a pretty great place to be.

We parked at an elementary school with this wonderful, open to the public fort-style playground. We let the kids check it out for a while before we all headed over to the festival. They had one of these playgrounds in Ruidoso, NM, too, when we went there in 2013. I bet it's still there.

The girls, having bought themselves some fairy wings for $2 each, waited with Ian and me at the bandstand while Rob went to get the car. We found out, by the way, that it was also the 125th anniversary of basketball, which was invented by James Naismith and first played on a court at Springfield College, Massachusetts. They were having 3-on-3 b-ball games at the festival, and the announcer explained that this had been a festival tradition every year since the invention of the sport. Pretty cool. 

Rachel consoled her tired little bro.

 We came back later for fireworks, which were okay, but not as much fun as the festival. Had we all been less exhausted, we would have gotten more out of the fireworks. All in all, it was a great day and a fun way to kick off our Colorado adventures.

The next day, we checked out the Florissant Fossil Beds, and the following day, the Florissant Public Library. I'll tell you about those in my next post. Au revoir!

Another Big Trip: Colorado! Part 1

Obviously, I'm not much of a blogger! It's been over a year. To quickly bring you up to date, Natalie is about to turn 7, entering second grade this fall. Rachel is 5, entering Kindergarten. Ian turns 2 in a week.

This past January, Rob and I decided to pull the trigger and book a vacation we've wanted to try for a long time: a big chunk of the summer in the mountains. The Austin, TX area is ridiculously hot this time of year. Florissant, Colorado, 880 miles to the NNW, is not hot. It's really nice. It's 8,200 feet above sea level. This is where we found a funky, cute, cool 3/2 house for rent through AirBnB. We rented it for an entire month.

We're six days into the trip, so I'll summarize the past six days before they slip away from my memory. I have the feeling that at the end of the month, this will all seem like one big blur.

Day One - July 1:

Ian fell asleep within the first hour of the trip, just outside of Johnson City, TX. That's a stuffed soccer ball, by the way.

Natalie and Rachel settled in for the long drive. Natalie is sporting the "traveling beret" she made with her Granny just before the trip. I think it's inside out in this photo.

Our first day's drive was relatively short--6 hours according to Google Maps, so more like 9 for us. We drove from Dripping Springs to Lubbock. With three young kids, there are so many stops. We could strong-arm them into drinking less, holding it longer, but we don't. I want them to remember road trips fondly.

Natalie took some photos along the way. West Texas looks a whole lot like this, plus thousands of wind turbines starting at around Sweetwater.

I like what she did with color here.

She took a photo of Mom driving, Dad in the front seat. Not a photo we ever would have had otherwise.

Day 2 - July 2: We didn't sleep too poorly in our hotel in Lubbock, though we never sleep all that well in hotels. It was fine. Ian slept on the sleeper sofa, the girls bunked together, and Rob and I bunked together. Before having three kids, I had heard that you can't all share a hotel room after two kids. Happily, that's not true. It's not even illegal. I put three kids on the reservation and everything.

The hotel was nothing special, yet Ian was reluctant to leave. Here's his tantrum in the middle of the parking lot. Thankfully, the place was brand new, so the parking lot at least appeared to be fairly clean. (There was no traffic.)

Our lunch stop was in Dalhart, TX, way up in the panhandle. If you've never driven north through Texas, let me tell you, it's a long, long way. The scenery is mostly flat farmland, grain elevators, a few or a lot of cows, wind mills and turbines, and weathered little towns. It's windy and dusty. I wouldn't fault you for thinking there's nothing interesting out there.

We stopped at a little Mexican restaurant in Dalhart, pulling out of a stalled traffic jam on highway 80, near what appeared to be the center of town. We had a decent lunch in that quaint, charmingly dated little place. Rob asked the ladies at the cashier stand if there were any parks or playgrounds around. He said one of them seemed mildly offended at the suggestion that Dalhart lacked parks. They told him about a place called The Pavilion nearby. "You can't miss it," they said.

Well, we almost did miss it, but I'm glad we didn't. This little green grove of trees and surprisingly well-equipped playscape were hiding in a valley next to the somewhat more visible pavilion.

Everyone tried out the rock wall. Some of us made it to the top. Dolly took a rest in the circle window.

The playscape was ensconced by a wooded ridge. We explored.

Bubby found some bricks and started building. He called this a triangle.

I don't know what this is, and wish I could have seen it bloom. The flowers were off-duty in the early afternoon. Maybe it comes to life in the evening or early morning, as some flowers do in our part of Texas. It must be tough and xeric, perched up on this dry, sun- and wind-bathed rock ridge.

Natalie peered over the cliff.

There was even a cave, big enough for a good-sized cat to squeeze through.

See? Told you.

I took over driving after Dalhart, and kept the wheel through the rest of Texas, the beautiful and very sparsely populated NE corner of New Mexico, and southern Colorado. There were hills, then foothills, then an occasional mountain, then dense mountains around Trinidad, CO. There was a storm. It rained heavily, then lightly, then heavily again. I let Rob take over driving in Pueblo. When we got to Colorado Springs, we realized there was a Rudy's BBQ in town, and on our way to Florissant, no less. Easy decision. Apparently, this Texas chain is popular with the locals here, too. They had a Green Chile Stew which the cashier said was his favorite thing on the menu. I tried it and liked it well enough. It would have been downright heavenly on a colder day.

The temperatures were cooling steadily as we climbed into the mountains on highway 24. I'll save our first few days in Colorado for my next post. 

Just writing this steeps me in gratitude for the privilege of coming here. If you've read this far, thanks for coming along for the ride.