Hello! Sorry, me again! Rob is writing up a few papers at the moment, but will be back writing posts very soon 🙂

I was going to title this post ‘An average Saturday in Fort Collins’ but to be honest it was a pretty great Saturday. It was also kind of Saint Patricks day, which for those of you who don’t know is a pretty big deal in the US. Like, a way bigger deal than it is in England or even Ireland. Saint Patricks day isn’t actually until the 17th, but it’s celebrated on a Saturday for reasons that will soon become obvious. How is it celebrated, you ask?

Firstly, Parade! A big one! Big and odd…

 

 

I thoroughly enjoyed the parade, it was nothing short of magnificent. I absolutely insist that we in the UK organise and start having parades like this ourselves. So good!

Hopefully for the UK parades we will be better prepared, but unfortunately we weren’t dressed appropriately this time. As you can probably see in a few of these pictures above, green is the colour to wear! And ideally green with an Irish slogan on it. If you want to go all in, you can literally dress up like you’re Irish. You read that correctly. We were deeply impressed by the Walmart selection:

Again, the whole thing is kind of awesome 🙂 After a quick trip to Target, we have fixed our lack of Irish wear so that we can better blend in for the big day!

But back to Saturday! After the parade and an amazing breakfast at the Silver Grill (it’s so good! SO GOOD!) we carried on with our day. After the above shopping for our Irish gear we decided on a lovely drink in the sun. The traditional Irish day celebration is to drink heavily, the drink of choice being a beer dyed green, until you pass out in the street – thus the move to a Saturday. Luckily, we chose a classier route with our day drinking:

There is a big Budweiser factory on the edge of Fort Collins which has an amazing restaurant/ bar/ beer garden. They also for a limited time have Clydesdales! These are big strong horses that used to pull the Budweiser carts back in the very early days, and now kind of act as mascots. They’re also placed for maximum picturesqueness (totes a word) in front of the mountains!

They also had some inside the stables, looking extra fabulous and also ginormous:

But anyway, we enjoyed our beer in the sun and it was deeply relaxing. One each was enough for us to be deeply sleepy, and wimpy US pints no less! Only 470 mL, I mean really. So, we returned home to relax in the house for a bit before carrying on with our day.

As you can imagine productivity trailed off quite sharply into the evening, but we did eat healthy salad for tea and pop into the shops once more. We went to get Rob’s skis polished, and to scout out rental skis for me. We also, after much coercing from me, dropped into the Puppy Store! It’s just so cute, I can’t help it:

Don’t judge me! What, I’m supposed to just not look at the puppies? I’m not dead inside and I love them. Also don’t worry about the small pens, they alternate getting them out for a run around so they’re only in there when they’re sleepy. Luckily I only looked at the puppies since Rob sensibly did not let me get any of them out for petting. One day!

That’s all for now, more soon! In the meantime, Happy almost St Patricks day to you all! 🙂