Our Texas visitors

Ken and Nancy visited from Texas last weekend, extending Matt's birthday another week.  After a fantastic dinner at home of filets and sea scallops, we got up on Saturday and went to Breckenridge for the day.  A really nice town, and the weather was great.

Lunch at the Breckenridge brewery, window shopping and some actual shopping.  We stopped at our favorite cookie shop and for fun looked at multiple real estate flyers along the way.  Oh to have a Colorado mountain retreat!

A relaxing dinner at home and watching a brutal loss by my Baylor bears.  Sunday brought some nice hiking up chief mountain, photo below.  The view was clearer than usual, and it wasn't too bad at the top, with some snow on the route along the way.  We stopped by echo lake n the way back, and the lake already had ice on it!  Some afternoon shopping at REI, grilled chicken for dinner, which brought a fun weekend to a close.  Looking forward to seeing them again around Christmas!

Matt's birthday weekend in Chicago

Last weekend karla surprised me with a birthday weekend in Chicago.  All she originally told me was "take the afternoon on Friday off, you don't get to know why".  So when we landed at midway, I had some ideas of what karla had planned, but was totally surprised when all our great Chicago friends were waiting at Kristins to party!  Karla arranged for personal chefs(the chef Monica has recently been on the food network show 'Chopped') and had a tapas themed fiesta.  My favorite tapas were in order along with a crap load of wine.  It was great to hang with friends we haven't seen in awhile, and some friends that we will see in Vegas soon.  After the party had died down, I got the great idea to go to the local bar.  Adam and patrick agreed to continue the party, and we ended up closing down the bar around 2pm. 

A hangover was in order the next day.  Fortunately it was raining the rest of the weekend, since I moved from the couch only to go to brunch.  Karla and I did make it out to dinner at one of our favorite Chicago restaraunts, Bistro Campagne, a french restaraunt in our old neighborhood.  After a nice walk after and a quick drive past Wrigley field, we got some much needed sleep.  My good friend Amy drove up from Peoria to party, and it was nice to go to brunch with her and her boyfriend  before a flight back to denver on Sunday.  A great birthday weekend!!

Hiking in Snow

We had a semi-busy weekend.  Friday night was happy hour with our volleyball team.  Since we got 2nd in the last tournament, we had a gift certificate to use.  So we treated ourselves to beer, wine, appetizers, and pizza.  When we were finished there, most of us decided to go to Naomi's house for a post-happy hour drink and ended up staying until 11pm.  Quite the happy hour!  Luckily, thanks to the great deals at the restaurant, we still have some money left on the gift certificate, so we get to have another happy hour soon.

Saturday was a chilly, rain/sleet day so we decided to stay in and watch some football.  We did run some errands - including one to REI to get Matt some hiking boots!  So, of course we had to plan to go hiking a bit on Sunday...

Sunday was a nice day - high in the 60's.  We decided to go to Mt. Falcon park (near Morrison, CO) to do a few miles of hiking to break in Matt's boots.  We hiked for about 90 minutes.  They had gotten some heavy frost and a little bit of snow Saturday and Saturday night, so the hike was beautiful with the snow covered trees.  However, it felt a bit like hiking in the rain since the sunshine was melting all of the snow.

Matt had Columbus Day off.  You have to love banking holidays, right?  So he went up to Chautauqua Park in Boulder.  We went there a lot this spring, but haven't been in a while.  He hiked the Royal Arch trail and got some more miles in his new boots!

Camping and Football

This past weekend involved camping and a lot of football.  Our friend Jamie wanted to take her twins camping one more time before the end of the season.  Karla wanted to try out her new sleeping bag.  So a girls' camping trip happened Saturday night.  Doug and Matt decided to stay back in the Denver area, run a few errands, drink some beer, and watch some football.

Jamie and Karla headed out to the foothills for the camping.  It ended up being quite fun!  There's nothing like roasting a marshmallow over a campfire.  The twins got a little chilly at night - it was colder than Jamie expected - but overall, it was quite fun!  Can't wait to camp with them again next year, although that will be more challenging since the twins will both be mobile.