Hello again 🙂

We had much adventuring and ouchy legs this weekend! We took a trip to Snowy Range in Wyoming so that I could try my hand at skiing, and so that Rob could show off his mad skiing skills. I’ve done a day skiing before in Utah, but since we’ve got a full five days skiing in Steamboat coming up in a few weeks (yay!) practice was needed.

We decided to go to Snowy Range because it’s very close, only about an hour and a half drive away, and the drive up through Wyoming is very beautiful. It’s also a great place for beginners, with lots of nice gentle green slopes. Ski slopes are rated by difficulty, with green being the easiest, blue being next, and black being the hardest:

But before the slopes, we had to check into our hotel in the adorable local town, Centennial. Although Town might be a little generous, with the population of 270 people spread over 56 buildings. That said, it looked exactly how a little cowboy town should look and I loved it:

It was even nice enough that we were only slightly panicked by the lack of Wifi anywhere. We asked the lady at the motel and she said that rather unsurprisingly none of the big internet providers consider the town a priority, which I suppose was hard to argue with. Speaking of our hotel, the pleasingly named Friendly Store & Motel, it slightly worryingly looked like this:

When I told my colleagues that I was spending a weekend in rural Wyoming a few of them joked that we should try and sleep in shifts so that no-one murdered us in our sleep. We now got the joke, but luckily as I said the lady from the store was very nice and the door to our room locked very securely!

So, on to the slopes. We’d talked about me having an actual lesson with an instructor, but since I don’t follow instructions well and prefer to figure things out for myself we decided to give that a miss. Instead, we got kitted up and started slow on the baby slopes.

The first big hurdle was the ski lift, where my refusal to follow instructions became clear almost immediately. You are supposed to unhook your poles from your wrists, sit on your chair lift with the skis out of the way and let the chair do its thing. You then stand up when the chair gets to the top, and ski out of the way so that it doesn’t scoop you back up again. Almost all of these things were an issue. First I kept forgetting to remove the poles and get the skis out of the way, but luckily only once caused a ski to go flying off and the lift guy popped it back on almost immediately. The top was far more challenging! I was quite worried that I would get left behind, so kept trying to stand up too early and making everything swing around a lot. Clinging to Rob was also a key part of this process, but I didn’t manage to topple him down the mountain at any point despite many attempts!

The next big hurdle was, of course, basic skiing. Skiing properly will come later! As you can imagine being able to stop when you want to is always useful, as is being able to move forward without falling over. With careful tutelage from Rob we worked on these things, and I slowly began to improve. It’s really pleasing that as you’re able to handle steeper slopes skiing gets way easier. When the slope is flatter you have to use quite a lot of energy to keep moving, and you feel less stable; when the slope is steeper moving forward is effortless so you just need to steer/ not fall over.

It also gets much easier as your technique improves! To start with I was stopping using the snowplow, where you make an inverted ‘V’ with the skis while facing forward to force yourself to stop. This was just murder on the knees, and only really works when you’re travelling below a certain speed. I’m working now on parallel skiing, where instead of stopping suddenly you control your speed by turning. You can imagine that if you’re facing down the mountain you’re accelerating quickly, whereas if you’re perpendicular then you don’t move at all. This is why skiers serpentine down slopes instead of just shooting down in a straight line, because it stops you building up too much speed. I’m by no means great at it, but happily now good enough that the whole process is no longer terrifying:

We had an amazing time, tired ourselves out thoroughly, and had regular coffee breaks since Rob is very aware of the subtle art of operant conditioning:

Some of these breaks also gave Rob a chance to show off his mad skiing skills, which have only improved as he continues to do his high altitude half Marathon training! I actually had an extremely good time making fun of the fact that his legs were almost too muscular to fit into the ski boots, I swear his calves now have three distinct leg biceps…

Anyway, here he is making me scream by pretending that he is going to crash into me, even though I am his wife and soulmate:

On the evening of our first day we went to the Old Corral Steakhouse, which was shown above in the picture of Centennial, and oh my goodness it was magnificent. I was worried that it might be a bit shabby since it was so isolated but not only did we have to wait 30 minutes for a table (pff!), it was one of the best steaks I have ever had.

There just are no words for something so beautiful. Plus the beer was amazing and the service was great, so we were extremely happy bunnies. Already tired from the skiing we passed into near comas after our steaks.

On Sunday we had a hearty breakfast, and then dragged our aching bodies back up to the slopes for some more skiing. We’d managed most of the green runs on the Saturday, so it was time to live dangerously and try some blue runs. The first run we tried was on the far left of the map, called Seminole, and was very beautiful. Tricky, but the views more than made up for it:

I had two tries at flopping around in the snow like a dying seal, but mostly it went okay! Annoyingly one of those tries was right at the bottom of the mountain, on the perfectly flat ground, but c’est la vie! I was still very proud and excited.

We then moved on to the big leagues, trying out the very pretty and lightly terrifying Virginian:

Anyway, I did it! Yataaaa! All the way down without falling over once, and with only very minor cursing. You would’ve been proud, I was serpentining all over the place. So much fun!

Sadly after a few more hours hour little legs could take no more, so we packed everything up and headed back to sunny Colorado, more tanned than when we left! We now have two weeks of recovery before the amazing Steamboat. Can’t wait!!

More soon! Xx

Hello again all!

Last weekend we finally got a chance to explore the Rocky Mountain National Park, specifically Estes Park! We’ve been wanting to go for a while, so we were very pleased to get a chance to at last have a run around 🙂 It wasn’t necessarily warm, but it was certainly warmer than usual so we decided to risk it. And don’t worry, we of course took pictures!

But first, more about the park itself. Estes Park is the headquarters for the Rocky Mountain National Park, and contains a lot of very beautiful must see features. It’s only about an hour from our apartment and contains lots of hiking trails, wall climbing routes and amazing views. It also had a lovely nearby town, which contains the famous Stanley Hotel. This is the hotel that Stephen King stayed in, and which was his inspiration for the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. This is a big selling point for the hotel, although after discussing it Rob and I weren’t necessarily sure that this was a flattering thing. More importantly Estes also contains the Twin Owls Steakhouse, which the wonderful Auntie Mary and Uncle Chris bought us a voucher for!

To get to Estes Park, we have to drive along the pleasingly named Big Thompson Gorge. This was a very pretty drive along the river, which runs through the gorge. We kept an eye out for bears but sadly didn’t see any, although we remain ever vigilant.

There are a lot of things that we want to see in Estes Park and it will take us a while to see them all, but one of the things that I’m keen to see are the nearby lakes. There are various hikes around Bear Lake, Dream Lake and Emerald Lake that looks very beautiful, and these hikes are high enough that you can see the famous Pikes Peak. It was 65°F and sunny in Fort Collins with no snow I thought this would be no problem, but I forgot something pretty basic. That something is that the mountains are both a lot colder, and extremely snowy… specifically there was about 50 inches of snow, which is just over four foot.

The trails had been very well packed down so we were able to walk along the snow without many problems (although I probably shouldn’t have worn trainers) but quite a lot of things were buried deep in snow. Luckily the initial trailhead was still visible, and we could just follow the packed snow from there. You knew if you went wrong because you dropped a foot deep down into the loose snow, which was both bracing and a pretty clear signal. Again, water-proof shoes would’ve been a pretty smart move! Fortunately we made it through to the first lake, Bear Lake, and were very proud of ourselves. Of course, this was also under 4 foot of snow…

Not to worry though. The sky was blue, the snow was white, what we could see of the trees were green 🙂 Unperturbed we carried on in our travels. Once we got a little higher, around 9,800 ft, the views were amazing! The highest point in the park is Longs Peak, which is much higher up at 14,259 ft, but we’ll build up to that… And speaking of Longs Peak, extra big picture since it’s so lovely!

 

We were very impressed, and stayed for a while to admire the view. We then carried on in our quest for the next lake, which was Dream Lake! It was still quite cold, about 30°F in the park, but we got a lot warmer as we walked. One of the things we’re still getting used to is how much of a difference the sun and wind make to the temperature. When we were out of the wind and in the sun it was positively balmy, but no sun and lots of wind was extremely cold. I probably felt more temperature variation over that one day that I have in the last year of living in England.

So, we hiked on happily while trying to stay in the sun as much as possible. We were walking for about two hours before we got to Dream Lake, which was extremely in the wind but happily was not under several feet of ice. At this point the elevation was an impressive 9,905 ft, and the view continued to be very lovely.

You can see the lake to the left of the picture, looking very nice and ripply. It’s still frozen over, but less so than everything else! You could kind of recognize it as a lake, which was a big improvement. We’re looking forward to revisiting it once it melts, since it supposedly has extremely clear water that reflects the mountains. We probably need to give it a few more months though!

We also met this feathery friend, meaning we get to play a quick round of ‘name that bird’. There were two of them and they were both very friendly, and very amenable to having their pictures taken:

I have no idea what type of bird it is, so let me know! It was about the same size/ shape as a Jay or a Blackbird. First to name it gets ten points, which can be redeemed for absolutely nothing 🙂

On the way back we spent a little more time enjoying the views/ posing for album cover style pictures:

Okay, you’ve endured enough of that for now. But to recap – very beautiful, quite cold, we’ll definitely make you walk around it when you visit 🙂

After our nice walk we got back to the car to warm up a little, and then drove over to the other side of the park to see what was what. We had been told that there was a very nice waterfall with lots of rocks to jump around, and we are always up for jumping around rocks. You’ll be pleased to know that we had enough sense not to try and take pictures while bouncing around, but we did get one of the waterfall before we started leaping around the place!

Again, the fact that most of the water was frozen limited the magnificence, but we were still very impressed. And once we’d tired ourselves out we got to take more silly album cover pictures, to inflict on you all! Mwa-ha-ha 🙂

Sorry, I’ll stop 🙂 Anyway, we had a whale of a time. After we were done we went to one of the bathrooms to clean ourselves up a bit, since we had fancy dinner plans for the evening! As I said at the start, Auntie Mary and Uncle Chris had bought us a voucher for the lovely Twin Owls Steakhouse, which we’d booked a table for that evening.

It was only a short ride to the steakhouse, which is very near the Stanley Hotel. We were only slightly held up by some Mountain-style road blocks:

And when we got to the Steakhouse we saw that there were more Elk wandering around outside! It was a strong start, and all very exciting 🙂

When we got into the steakhouse everything continued to be very fancy, with lots of pretty exposed wood. We started with fresh baked bread and olive oil, and then decided to go big and treat ourselves to some appetizers as well. Rob had the soup of the day, and I had some bacon wrapped scallops!

Then for the main course – we both avoided the Elk that was on the menu after making our new friends, and opted for nice fancy steaks!

It was awesome. We’d worn up a nice appetite by running around the mountains, so everything disappeared very quickly. It was followed quickly by a very delicious and very extravagant $9 glass of wine.

So yes, very good times all around! As you can imagine after these we were extremely sleepy, so we drove ourselves back home and almost immediately fell asleep. For poor Rob this whole experience had been preceded by an early morning 9 mile run, so we was pretty much paralyzed from the waist down at this point. He also needed his sleep for the Sunday morning 9 mile run, so early bedtimes were very important.

But more on that later! I hope that you enjoyed this blog of many pictures, and we hope to have more for you again soon!

Xx

Hello again! Sorry for all the blog posts – I’ve been struck down with a cold so am trying to do something useful that does not require movement 🙂 That said, Rob and I braved the outside world today to visit the Loveland Outland Mall, since Rob has almost no clothes. Also, because the Outlet Mall is amazing and absurd.

All the Malls that we’ve visited so far differ from England in that the shops aren’t interconnected. There is just a big car park in the middle, and all the shops are around the edge. This means that if you’re feeling super lazy, you can literally drive from store to store! Although rest assured, we did not. It’s a little strange, but I guess makes more sense once you think about it. Here is a map of the mall, with all the gaps between stores being a super-massive car park:

There is also an even bigger mall across the road, with many shops of every kind plus an ice rink. We were pretty impressed.

We did much shopping, and were impressed by the many absurd discounts. At the risk of sounding like I’m advertising, it really was extremely cheap:

We of course got some new shops in the absurdly cheap shoe store! Rob got some fancy new Vans, and I got some pretty red shoes that I definitely cannot wear in the snow (or ever). Absolutely no points for guessing which are which:

Once our feet were taken care of, we headed into the massiveness that was Macy’s. Again, prices were absurd:

After much trying on of clothes, and some translating between English and American, we got there. Here is a helpful guide for future reference:

• Trousers = Pants
• Jumpers = Sweaters
• Salopettes = Snow Pants – much to our annoyance

The last one took me a really long time, and much confusion on the part of the poor store guy 🙂 Anyway, behold!

The comfy hoody was $12.99 – reduced from $75. The trousers, $40 reduced from $65. It was very hard not to spend a lot of money, tricksy Mall!

So yes, just a little blog post for today, but important information nonetheless! The lesson here is that you must bring an extra suitcase when you visit us. And help us curb what might be the start of a crippling spending addiction.

Woo! 🙂 🙂 Xx

Yes, this is happening. Like it or not, I am going to tell you about this years Super Bowl! Hopefully I have left enough time for everyone interested to watch it, or hear the results. If not, go watch it now. We’ll wait…

Okay! So, for those not aware, I’m getting very into American Football. Rob is also getting into it a little, but it probably does not make his ‘top five sports’ cut. Ironically, the things that make it appeal to me are what are off-putting for Rob. It is much more commercial and arguably more accessable than most sports. All teams have a name, a mascot, a logo, as well as the quarterback who tends to act as the face of the team. So instead of supporting ‘Denver’ you are supporting ‘Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos’, for example, which makes it feel a lot more involved. I think this is part of the reason that a much larger percentage of the population here follow American Football than follow Soccer in the UK.

The game is also broken into a series of small plays, with frequent pauses to rest, discuss the next stage or switch between the offensive and defensive players. This is a necessary part of the game, since once everyone is in a big pile on top of the ball you kind of need to stop and reset. This is also when they slip some commercial breaks in. The adverts are admittedy pretty dire, but you generally just have one or two in each short break, so it isn’t as bad as it could be! And arguably watching a ten second advert is more interesting than watching everyone line up again, although Rob vehemently disagrees…

Anyway, these individual plays have varying goals depending on whereabouts each team is in the game. Most commonly the offensive team needs to push forward 10 yards and the defensive team needs to stop them, but there are a lot of nuances to this depending on where you are, who’s in the lead, what attempt you’re on, etc… Long story short, this means that the team objectives are very short term and easy to follow – instead of the team objective being “score a goal, you have 90 minutes” it becomes “run three yards, you have 20 seconds”. For those of us who are a little attention deficit and tend to keep one eye on the nachos while watching the game, this is a big advantage 🙂

So, to last Sunday (9th Feb). Our magnificent Denver Broncos beat the abomination that is the New England Patriots (our main rivals) to win the AFC Championship. This was very exciting times, and mostly due to our outstanding defense.

This meant that we got to face the NFC Champions, The Carolina Panthers, in the Super Bowl. They were most definitely worthy and terrifying opponents, led by their Quarterback Cam Newton. They won the NFC Championships by defeating the Arizona Cardinals 49 – 15, which as you can imagine is a pretty significant lead. They also very rarely lose the lead in any of their games due to their amazing Offense, and tend to score high.

As you can imagine, we were the underdogs going into the Super Bowl, which was held in Santa Clara, CA. Nonetheless, we remained strong and optimistic, with Rob predicting a solid win for the Broncos. The whole of Colorado bought Broncos merchandise, painted everything orange, tore up some fencing to make our own ‘Defense’ signs. And we’re ready to go! Just a quick tasteful entrance…

And away we went. Fun fact – whilst the Broncos usually play in Orange, they wear White for the Superbowl, since they were wearing White in their last Superbowl win. There is a lot of superstition associated with the Superbowl, as with most sporting events, which Rob and I happily got to partake in. Since the Broncos have won every game that we’ve watched (and lost the one that we missed) we have been designed as ‘English Lucky Charms’ – we dressed appropriately:

As I said, we are really getting into this American Football mojo. So, the Superbowl!

We lost the coin toss, as always, so the Panthers kicked first. This meant that we started with the ball, and we were looking very strong both offensively and defensively. Plus all of Peyton’s limbs and joints were fully functioning, and he was shouting very decisively, which was fabulous:

I’m definitely not going to give you the whole detailed play by play, partly because it’s pretty complex but mostly because it’s obscured by alcohol. So, a quick summary of the exciting touchdowns:

And finally…

And so, final score was 24-10 to the Denver Broncos. WE WON THE SUPERBOWL! Very, very exciting times. We briefly considered rioting in Downtown Denver, but the news coverage showed everyone celebrating safely and responsibly so we stayed in. We had a few more drinks, talked about our deep love for the Broncos, and were very happy. Victory Selfie!

There was a victory parade in Denver to celebrate which was pretty amazing! The team all got driven around on big trucks for the adoration of the masses, before a party at the City & Country Building.

Which looks more impressive when zoomed out a little more:

I’m told that the final zooming doesn’t really do it justice either! Final attendance was around 1 million people, which is just absurd. Anyway, to summarise…

Go BRONCOS!!!! 🙂 🙂

Hi all!

We went to Denver on Saturday to give the car a run, and to see more of our lovely state capital! It’s only about an hours drive away, so we are keen to explore it.

We drove down, hindered only slightly by the car engine starting to smoke. We took a quick detour to the garage, the mechanics confirmed that it was just leftover oil from the previous leak, and back off we went with no futher problems!

We had a lovely drive down – Colorado weather did it’s usual thing and behaved erratically, so it was very warm. We actually had to turn the air conditioning on in the car, it was lovely! When we got to Denver it was still nice and sunny, so we walked around Downtown for a bit and enjoyed the sights. These include some pretty energetic displays of Broncos support via lights and hanging shirts:

I also enjoyed the Police motorcycles, which you could sit on and have your picture taken! This was the first of many public displays of childishness, of which I regret none:

Once we tired of making vroom-vroom noises, we headed up to the Denver Aquarium since it was rumoured to be amazing. It also has the two most baffling main attractions of any aquarium ever… Mermaids and Tigers!! This we had to see.

We arrived late in the afternoon so avoided most of the sticky children, leaving us free to enjoy such cool things as the walk through the underwater tunnel:

The happy Stingrays:

The Eel party:

The scary massive shark tank:

Mr Tiger, who mercifully was not in a fish tank of his own:

And my personal favourite, Mr Octopus!

After walking around for a few hours we got the end of the Aquarium, where you can feed the stingrays! I fed a lot of stingrays, and Rob fed one before deciding that he did not like having his fingers nibbled. We would’ve taken pictures, but the stingrays were extremely splashy! They were noticeably impatient for their frozen little fish.

After petting the stingrays we made our way over the face painting stall, where we absolutely did not get our faces painted. We are responsible grown ups who would not make a scene like that.

Ok, fine. We love face paint. We couldn’t resist.

Now that we were looking sufficiently fancy, we doubled back to catch the last Mermaid show of the day. I would love to say that we went out of curiousity, or to be ironic, but no. Mermaids were awesome when I was five, and they’re still awesome now! The show itself did not disappoint – there were three girls with Mermaid tails swimming around the actual main fish tank, doing very impressive free diving and synchromised swimming. And, of course, working the children (and me) into a frenzy:

I was beyond excited. Finally, we went outside to further show off our cool face paint and to check out the 4D-cinema. We had a brief debate about whether it was actually 4-dimensional, and decided that at best the name was misleading. Nonetheless, we went to see a brief documentary about Shallow Waters, which we only slightly came to regret.

It turns out that in this case the cinema is 4D because stuff is happening in the cinema itself, as well as on the 3D screen. When a Whale splashes you get water shot in your face, when you see Starfish on the ocean floor something whips your legs, and so on. At one point in the film a snake jumps out, at which point something stabbed out of the back of each seat and poked everyone in the kidneys! Really hard! Everyone was extremely afraid of their seats after that. It was pretty interesting, but certainly not relaxing…

Deciding that this was enough fun for one day, we left the Aquarium and headed back to lovely Fort Collins, only slightly delayed by me missing the turn on the interstate. It was definitely good times though, so we hope to be back to Denver again soon!

Thanks for reading 🙂 Xx

Hello all!

Sorry for the delay in posting again, it’s been a very hectic week as always! I’ll be trying to catch up over the next few days.

First things first, Rosemary & Chris treated us to an amazing weekend in their Mountain Cabin last weekend, and we had an extremely good time. Their cabin is up in Crystal Lakes, up in the Rocky Mountains near the Wyoming Boarder. It was about a 70 minute drive from our house, and up at about 8,500 ft. This was high enough that all of the crisp packets that we had inflated like balloons…

The drive up to the cabin was very beautiful, but pretty tricky in some places. There was a lot more snow up in the mountains, and most of the roads had not been gritted or plowed in any way. We had a few little slides – nothing serious but we were definitely glad to not still be driving the Micra, which would probably have been completely under the snow…

We were blown away by the cabin when we got there, it is very beautiful. We were too distracted running around in the snow to get a good picture of the cabin, but here is a similar looking one from Google!

The cabin is heated primarily by a big log fire so we snuggled in front of that, but everything was very warm and there was lots of nice hot water for long showers! Chris and Rosemary have done a lot of renevation on the cabin so it is beautifully furnished and the layout is amazing. The two outer facing walls are glass, so the view of the mountains was unbelievable! It was very foggy on our first day there, but the view was still outstanding:

Very, very lovely, and only a little bit freezing cold. It was 3°F (-16°C) when we got there, so of course we went out of a nice walk with Toby the dog! It was all wonderful, and there were a lot of opportunities for great views of the mountains and of strangely placed large rocks:

We continued being happy outdoors people the next day, by going to Beaver Meadows for some cold excitement! We went Tubing, which I hadn’t tried before but was awesome fun. There were big slides formed down the snowy slopes that you could rocket down on a rubber ring like a crazy person. Extra fun came from the wind moving the snow around, so that the dividing walls kept breaking down and blowing fresh snow in your face. I screamed like a child and loved it:

We kept it up for about an hour before the snow in the face started to result in complete numbness, at which point we retreated to the restaurant for hot chocolate. We choose to get the hot chocolates with a dash of peppermint schnapps, although these turned out to be about 70% schnapps. It was like drinking slightly chocolately, very thin toothpaste, but it did warm us up pretty quickly! We were all very relaxed by the time we got back to the cabin for relaxation, dinner and the movie Avatar.

The next day, we went Snowshoeing! This is where you wear snowshoes to spread your weight out a little, so that you can go hiking through very deep snow. We got to borrow some snowshoes, so strapped them on and off we went!

Our feet felt very heavy and it took us a little while to get used to walking around in them, but it was very cool once we got the hang of it! We then went for a beautiful hike around the lakes, although since all the lakes were frozen and under a few feet of snow we didn’t actually see any. I did see a Blue Jay though, so very proud of the first bird spot since we got here! We walked for a total of about two hours, and it was very pretty and very quiet. It’s actually a little eerie how quiet it is, but very relaxing. I can definitely see why authors have mountain cabin retreats for when they need to go write books, it was very serene.

We were very sad when we had to head back down to Fort Collins, although we were definitely a little relieved to be back at a lower altitude with at least some moisture in the air. We’ve offered to go and help cut down some trees if they need it sometime, so hopefully we were well behaved enough to get invited back again soon!

More later 🙂 Xx

Hi all

So as a leaving present for completing my PhD and for five years in my old research group (Warwick Electrochemistry & Interfaces group), I was bought tickets to see a fantastic band called Post Modern Jukebox in Denver.

We hired the smallest car we could find (a Chevy Impala) and drove down to the beautiful paramount theatre in Denver.

We managed to quickly eat dinner in a very famous chain restaurant called the Hard Rock Café (a favourite of Barry’s). These restaurants have rock memorabilia all over the walls, so that famous musicians can ‘reserve’ their seat by donating some clothes, a guitar etc.

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Though the Denver branch is relatively young (1998), they still had some fantastic stuff like a smashed up Pete Townsend guitar, some kitty ears and tail belonging to Madonna, and this guitar and apt description of albino electric guitarist Jonny Winters:

Amusingly, there had been a lot of snow in northern Colorado such that the band had not been able to drive and their flight had been delayed. As such they hired a private plane to transport them (so probably made a loss on the gig), but put on a very good show none the less.

The band take modern classics and put them in old-school styles (e.g. 1920’s jazz). They had 5 different singers and famous tap dancer Sarah Reich, as well as piano, drums, woodwind / brass and double bass so they did a wide variety of numbers. I made a playlist of my favourite songs here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWK0yP4Xuwzae-daWxVKupJTLcyDwMe58

On the way back we were understandably quite tired and it was past midnight by the time we left. However, the previous renters of our car had left an interesting cd in the drive…

It appeared to be a kid’s cd for learning about the world, with personalised lyrics from this very high pitched woman over nursery rhyme covers. I have been unable to find the name of the cd, but our favourite track (which required audience participation) went like this:

What do we do when someone is in our personal space?
We say…

Stop friend, you’re too close
Stop friend, you’re too close
Stop friend, you’re too close

Be my friend and keep me safe.

I’m sure you can imagine us singing along – very loud – to this driving home for Christmas.

Rob and Cat xx

Hello all, sorry for the sporadic posting, we have been busy doing lots of shopping and Christmas-ing.

So last week we had my work Christmas party. All of our group plus partners and children congregated at my bosses beautiful house in the south of Fort Collins for presents, eats and drinks.

Those who have been forced into eating my Key-Lime Pie in the past (also known as Blimey that’s Limey) will be pleased to know I managed to recreate the recipe with American ingredients, though they have NO BISCUITS HERE, so I used cookies instead.

Amongst the tasty food and drink we tried was the Brazilian spirit Cachaҫa alone, and in the form of a tasty limey cocktail called Caipirinha (recipe here – though fair warning; and I quote “two or three of these and you wake up and don’t remember your night”).

By far the highlight of the evening aside from the stellar company was the white elephant. This is a gift giving process similar to Secret Santa but enhanced. The rules are:

1. Everyone brings a wrapped but unlabelled present for say $15
2. Everyone draws a number from a hat
3. Number 1 opens their present
4. Number 2 can open another or steal the first present (then the first person gets to go again)
5. Number 3 can open another or steal from 1 or 2.
6. No present can be stolen more than twice.

It sounds a little complicated, but works really well as there is no pressure to get a specific present for somebody and there are a few joke gifts that somehow turn up every year.

Our Teddy Bear was very well received but we were not prepared for the magnitude of our gifts.

I opened mine to reveal a box of brownies, which upon opening revealed the three most recent James Bond films on DVD. It then turned out there was another British present which Cat miraculously chose:

The box said this way up so we were suspicious. Cat then opened it to find a small box and a tube of Pringles. It then dawned on us that Pringles are crisps, which are known as chips here, hence the present must be fish and chips.

So Cat opens the remaining box expecting some fish shaped sweets to find actual live goldfish in a bag!

Apparently they had been in the box a whole day without food or extra oxygen, but fortunately we managed to get them home safe and set them up with a tank shown above.

They are of course named Fish (the orange one) and Chips (the mixed coloured one)

xx

 

Welcome to Part Two!

After our exciting journey into Utah we arrived at Salt Lake City with the lovely Kim and Leoni. Temperatures were not warm in Salt Lake City, but we found the house with no problems and were warmly welcomed! This welcome continued when we went to visit some friends for an amazing Thanksgiving Dinner, where one of our preconceptions about Utah was quickly smashed. We assumed that alcohol would be pretty difficult to get hold of, and that everything would be very conservative and respectful of Mormonism, so we were surprised and impressed by our first beer…

As well as the excellent label it’s also a relatively high percentage, at 6%. Generally in America you can buy beer below 3% at supermarkets and general shops, but for anything more alcoholic than this you need to go to actual liquor stores.

But anyway, on with Thanksgiving! The food was unbelieveable, and plentiful enough to feed us all three times over. We had all the staples – delicious Turkey, Corn Casserole, Green Bean Casserole, Stuffing, Pumpkin Pie and many more! I ate so much that I may have actually blacked out, memory is patchy and you can bet that we weren’t on the ball enough to take any pictures… But rest assured, very good times were had! We followed all this eating with a highly competitive game of Cranium, which Team Channon + Tim were leading before it was abandoned when it became clear that none of us were skilled enough to actually complete it.

 

We tried so hard, oh how we tried, but honestly we weren’t even close. We chose to blame the cultural differences, even though we were playing the English version. Possibly the altitude was also a factor.

Anyway, we had amazing fun playing and are definitely indebted to our lovely hosts!

The following day we went on an exciting day of sightseeing around Salt Lake City, hosted again by the fabulous Kim and Leoni. We saw Temple, which is the centre of the Mormon Church as well as the kind-of centre of Salt Lake City. It’s not geographically in the middle, but all of the roads are named outwards from Temple, so heading south from Temple the roads are South Temple, 100 South, 200 South, 300 South, etc… This is extremely useful if you want to know where Temple is, but very confusing for us tourists trying to figure out where we are and don’t know the system, since 100 South will actually run East to West and so on. Anyway, Temple!

You cannot tour around inside the Temple, but the outside was lovely enough and there was a lot to see on the grounds, including this excellent statue of Jesus looking majestic:

After this we went to see the Salt Lake, specifically Antelope Island which is a State Park to the South East of the Lake. We were warned that the Salt Lake can smell a little ripe, but we thought this was definitely worth it to see the Bison and Antelope on the island as well as the famous lake itself! It was still extremely cold, but we had a lot of fun walking around some areas and driving around the bigger loop to go Bison seeking. Here is Rob looking chilly in front of the lake:

Needless to say we retreated quickly to the nice warm car and started the drive, where we saw many exciting animals! The most exciting was Mr Bison:

But we also saw Antelopes, Coyotes, Deer and many more! Very exciting times. We stayed until it got dark, so we got to see a very beautiful sunset over the Salt Lake which our camera completely failed to fully capture:

We returned home for some very delicious pizza and an excellent few rounds of the baffling Dominion with our hosts before an early night ready for the excitement to come.

Saturday was a big day, and we knew that we needed to be strong. We dressed up in a thousand layers and headed into the mountains for *skiing!!* 🙂

I’ve never skied before but Rob is pretty excellent at it so rather than bothering an instructor I forced my lovely husband to teach me the ways of the snow. This was not straightforward, partly because we didn’t realise that there was a beginner slope so dived straight into a very tall but relatively easy slope. It was a long way up, and a very long time to successfully get back down! Much fun was had, and I at least looked the part!

It’s hard to say whether riding up the ski lifts, sliding back down, or possibly even the crashing, was the most fun! We didn’t even notice the frosty -10oC temperature 🙂

We skied hard for many hours with our mad skills, before retreating back to the house for very warm showers and general recovery!

Luckily we had a gentle Sunday of driving back from Salt Lake to Fort Collins via Wyoming, so we could relax our painful limbs in the car! Despite everyones assurances that there was nothing of any interest on the drive, it was actually very beautiful. We didn’t see any of the famous wild horses but the landscape was snow covered and you could see for miles, so we were very impressed!

We finally arrived home about 6.30pm on the Sunday, ready for very early bedtimes all round! We’re now eagerly planning our next road trip, so trying to figure out what sights we need to see that are vaguely nearby. Recommendations very welcome!

I hope you enjoyed our adventures, more posts to follow as soon as we do something interesting!

Cat & Rob xx

Hello all!

We’ve had a very long and busy week, so you’ve in for a very long post with many pictures! Rejoice/ brace yourself as appropriate – part two will follow in the next few days so you have a little time to recover between the two 🙂

Last week was Thanksgiving, so Thursday and Friday were national holidays and our friends Kim and Leoni very kindly invited us to visit them in Utah, which was extremely exciting! As well as this Tuesday was the night that we had tickets to see one of my very favorite bands, Puscifer, so there was much to do. Since we needed to rent a car to do both it made sense to combine both trips into one truly epic, three-state road trip:

Very, very exciting times. First step was to hire an awesome car which the lovely Rob took care of, so for a week we had this beast of a tank which we nicknames Troy Wilson, named after the very manly man who rented us the car! Below is a stock photo, since our white car was dirty almost immediately:

It’s hard to appreciate its size without a point of reference, but it had seven seats, easily fit the skis and can apparently fit three bicycles in the back when the back seats are down… We were impressed. I drove it with the seat as far up and forward as it could possibly go and still had to lean forward to adjust the rear view mirror!

So, we set off Tuesday after work and drove down to Denver to see Puscifer. The show was excellent, I had such a good time! They’re amazing musicians and are well known for putting on crazy spectacular life shows. An example of their music, for the curious:

Their opening act was 20 minutes of luchador’s wrestling, it was outstanding.

After that epic excitement we stayed overnight in Denver in a Super-8 motel, so that we would be refreshed and ready for our trek across the Rocky Mountain National Park!

Luckily the actual navigating of this road trip was very straightforward, so we didn’t have to worry about getting lost. It is hard to tell from the map but the I-70 pretty much connects Denver and Moab, and is very well maintained so even though we were crossing the snow covered mountains the driving was not icy or excessively steep, thank goodness! Needless to say, the drive to Moab was very beautiful. The mountains were breath-taking and we could often see people skiing down the sides of various mountains since we passed very close to Breckenridge and Vail, as well as several other smaller resorts.

After the mountains we stopped off for a walk around and some lunch at Glenwood Springs, a very pretty town that happened to be about halfway between Denver and Moab. There are a lot of famous local hot springs of course, as well as great views and some lovely restaurants. We ate at our first American Smokehouse BBQ, which was beyond delicious! We needed to walk around in the cold snow to wake ourselves up a little after stuffing ourselves thoroughly with burgers and ribs! Luckily it was rather cold, so this did not take long:

Heading off from Glenwood Springs we continued on to our next big stop, which was Moab. Moab is a big, beautiful national park full of amazing rock formations and great views – it’s extremely popular for adventure holidays, there were a lot of options for hiking, climbing, off-roading and canyoneering, all of which were very tempting! But first, our first border crossing…

We were extremely excited. The picture on the sign is actually of the Arches National Park in Moab, which is what we were travelling to visit. Observe, the real thing:

As well as several other lovely shots of the landscape! It was honestly like being on Mars or something, it was hard to believe the rock formations and you could see such a long way which nothing man made visible anywhere. Most of the rock was bright red, but some places it was much paler and Jade-colored which I’ve never seen before. We really couldn’t capture how amazing it was with pictures, but we made a few attempts:

Lucky visitors to us here in the US may get a chance to see it for themselves! We are hoping to be able to go back and explore it more in future, as we were only there for a few hours before we had to set off for Salt Lake. Notice how warm and sunny it is in that picture compared to Glenwood Springs the day before, this US weather is not easy to dress for but we love it!

Part two to follow shortly, where you can learn about our exciting adventures in Salt Lake City and about our complete lack of any adventures in Wyoming. Hope you enjoyed so far!

Cat & Rob Xx