Hi All!

Sorry for the long delay since my last blog, we’ve had an extremely exciting visit from my brothers followed by two weeks of working hard and being boring, so not much to tell! Happily now the cousins are here, so this will all change 🙂

They flew in on Friday, and are here for just over a week of magnificent excitement!

The excitement started almost right away, when we visited the amazing Wild Animal Sanctuary!

I hadn’t heard of it before, but Marie found it online and it looked outstanding. What the Wild Animal Sanctuary does is rehome exotic animals that have been neglected or kept as pets illegally. It turns out that there is no law against owning exotic animals in five states (points for guessing which five!), and there are more tigers in Texas than are left in the wild! So we were happy to support a great cause, and also to see some happy wild animals.

The Sanctuary is set up so that animals are slowly allowed to get used to their new surroundings – a lot of them have been kept in very small enclosures and some have never seen sunlight before 😦 Once they are used to being outside they are slowly introduced to other animals of the same type so that they can form packs, and when that goes well they are moved to big 10 acre enclosures where they can live and be merry.

The park is basically a big walkway over the top of these enclosures, since predators don’t have any enemies from above so are not bothered by what goes on overhead. Here are some more of the amazing animals:

It was extremely wonderful, and I strongly recommend giving it a visit if you’re ever in Colorado, or donating generously via their website: http://www.wildanimalsanctuary.org/

Following the magic of the animal sanctuary, we relaxed at home while the wonderful Simon made us dinner and then we sleepily went to bed.

The next day, Exercise! First we went for a quick walk up the reservoir:

And then we went over to Lory state park for a hike up to Arthur Rock, which gives you epic views of the town and the reservoir! It is a 3.4 mile round trip, with the first half being quite steep! But very pretty, and it feels much more remote than it actually is.

A hard walk to the top, but excellent views once we got there 🙂

We had a quick picnic at the peak before heading back down to return into town. We went via the more rural part of town, so got to see some deer chilling in the fields!

We spent the rest of the day at the frankly amazing Fort Fun, which is just always great. We started with a fairly epic game of mini-golf:

This was wonderfully fun and we were not good, but that didn’t stop us taking it extremely seriously…

We followed our epic golfing with a quick but terrifying round in the batting cages:

And then fun in the arcade, which made our approach to golf look downright casual. No-one has ever taken arcade games as seriously as we did:

It definitely needs to be mentioned that Rob is AMAZING at the dance game. Never has someone poured so much soul into something with such outstanding results. I fell in love all over again ❤

As you can imagine by the evening we were pretty tired from all the excitement, so we treated ourselves to dinner at the all-you-can Mongolian Stir Fry restaurant. It was, as always, delicious!

We are now back in the apartment and extremely full, and playing an extremely competitive game of Settlers of Catan. Is it bliss 🙂

More soon! Xxx