Hi Again!

As promised we had a very exciting and busy weekend, the highlight of which was my work party! For those of you who don’t know I’m currently working in the customer experience team at Maple, a newly formed New York food delivery company. We make and serve tasty meals that people can order via our website, and working for Maple is a lot of fun 🙂

As well as being fast changing, working for Maple means that I am working in another time zone (Eastern Time) and get to talk to lots of New Yorkers, which is mostly fun! The best thing though is definitely the work events, of which we have now had two big ones.

The first was our Christmas Party, which was a glorious trifecta of Bowling, Laser Tag and free alcohol. Sadly I could not tell you much about it afterwards, mostly because I don’t remember much but also because what I do remember seems very unlikely. Rest assured, this time I was more vigilant in my blogging duties!

So anyway, our work party. We were all pretty excited when we found out it was going to be an Island Party, whilst also being a little confused about what exactly that entailed. It turns out it does exactly what it says on the tin: some lunatic has built a man-made party island, and you travel to this island and party. What a time to be alive.

The East side of the island! So fabulous:

It wasn’t that sunny on Saturday, but that was definitely a good thing. It was still very warm and humid, but without the direct sunlight overhead burning all of our skin off.

But anyway, the dress was of course island themed, and so everyone dressed appropriately. There was a much needed work outing to stock up on hawaiian shirts and dad shirts (both, where possible) and many leis were bought. Our CEO even flew over to party with us, which was outstanding 🙂

There was a lot to do on the island, including but not limited to:

• Playing on the water trampolene
• Swimming in the Lake
• Canoeing
• Pedaling the Pedalos
• Roasting things on the Fire pit
• Partaking in the open bar
• Volleyball
• Feeding the hungry and numerous Catfish
• Eating the tasty food that Papa Stephen cooked for us
• Chillaxing

It was truly a magical place. The Catfish definitely merit a picture or two because they’re amazing:

Volleyball also took up a lot of time, with Rob of course leading his team to repeated victory! I was very proud.

Our intrepid CEO even joined in, but it was not enough:

Anyway, we partied away and had a great time, and we now know that party islands are another fun thing that America has to offer. I am absolutely building a much worse version of this in my back garden when we move home, as soon as I figure out how.

So yes, that was the magic of party island, as well as an inspiring tale of how Rob and I successfully entered a Lake a second time without dying of parasitic infections. Where is your science now, Dad?!

Anyway, Love you all lots! 🙂 Xx

Hi All!

One of the best things and one of the worst things about living in the US is the food, and whilst we’ve shown you a lot of the good food I wanted to show you a little of the less delicious side of things for your enjoyment.

It’s much easier and cheaper to eat out in America, so people generally cook less and eat out more. There are also much bigger wage gaps, so there is a need for some of the food to be very low cost. The good part of this is that the fruit and deli section in most supermarkets (called Grocery Stores here in the US) are extremely awesome:

But there are also horrors. King Soopers where we shop is actually really nice, but not nice enough to be free of the occasional catastrope.

The meat section for example has a nice deli, and whilst meat standards in the US can be pretty poor we are generally okay here in Colorado 🙂 That said there is also some ‘pre-cooked’ meat available that is always a source of concern…

And there is also a strange tendancy to pack things in cans/ tubes. I’m assuming that this has something to do with making sure that everything lasts longer and can be stored long term, but it’s still a little odd:

What else can you get in tubes you say? Glad you asked!

Before you ask, no – I have no idea why croissant is spelt ‘crescent’, nor why these are considered ‘dinner rolls’. We have also not tried them, because oh the horror. However we have given another of the canned desserts a try, again as a result of a weird cultural interpretation. Brace yourself, for the English section of the supermarket!

This is actually awesome, if not a little expensive. The Bisto gravy is especally appreciated, as are the Maltesers 🙂 However they also have a ‘traditional english dessert’ that is inaccurate at best and a little weird. Behold, the food of our people, according to America:

Unsurprisingly it doesn’t taste that good once you scrape it out of the tin and blast it in the microwave, but it could be worst. And if you buy this as a gift for any American the will be amused and delighted, so that’s a plus!

It’s probably also worth mentioning that the Royal Family is ALWAYS in the news somewhere when you go past the magazines. Based on the titles we’ve seen so far the poor royal family have seen more action that the Game of Thrones people:

Anyway, on to the American section of the store, which is basically the whole rest of the store. If you want anything in a US flat pattern you are not out of luck!

I actually think that all of the above is pretty awesome, I love the American sense of National Pride. Take a lesson, England!

Anyway, back to the gross food. More horrors await in the ready meal sections:

I didn’t get any pictures of the ingredients lists, but rest assured that they are not entirely foody… Corn Dogs continue to be a real source of fascination to me, although we haven’t given them a try yet. We probably want to have some medical support nearby before we start eating them.

Speaking of non-ingredients, colours! I hope you like Powerade, now available in the following extremely bright colours:

And finally, a sweet memory of my old company, still with real cheese!

So yes, there are lots of delicious foods all over the place, but many hazards await the unworthy. Be vigilent, friends! And more posts soon 🙂

Much love xx

 

Hi Again!

We had a free day on Sunday, so decided to do an exciting road trip over to Nebraska to check out the famous Lake McConaughy! This is a very big lake to the west of the state, which totals 4 miles wide and 22 miles long, so pretty impressive. It also has white sandy beaches around the edge and allows all sorts of fun water-sports! Plus we’re like 1000 miles from the actual ocean, so this is our ocean now 🙂

But first, we had to get there. Our lovely car is all fixed and working now (it turns out that because there are no MOTs and the oil here is terrible you need to get the oil changed every 5000 miles or less. Now we know!) so we loaded it up and off we went.

It was a pretty long drive of about 3 1/2 hours each way, but we got to drive through parts of Wyoming and Colorado that we hadn’t seen before which was cool. Also Rob fell asleep immediately and stayed asleep for most of the drive down there, so the drive was not too taxing for him 😉 Here is the route we took:

So on the way there we went up through Wyoming, and we came back via Eastern Colorado. As promised both are almost completely empty of anything interesting to see, but we did get to stop at the signs on all the boarders and judge them! Wyoming’s sign was fabulous, and we were very impressed by it:

We have been to Wyoming a few times before but this was the first time that we had driven in via the I-25, because whilst the sign is awesome the road itself is a disaster. Lots of potholes and cheap tarmac. But I digress!

The Nebraska sign was also nowhere near as excellent at the Wyoming sign, which we found a little disappointing. We liked the green, but where was the wood? Where was the pizzazz? Also it meant waking Rob up again, which he was still not a fan of:

Still, we get to add Nebraska to the list of states visited (between us we are up to 14/ 50!) and I can scratch it off my map of the world.

As for Nebraska itself, it was almost exclusively grassland and an extremely straight road, but visibility was outstanding! We think we could see at least 50 miles away based on what towns we could see from how far out, plus we could see the mountains on the way back whilst still 60 minutes away from Fort Collins. Eventually we got our first peek at the lake!

We drove down to it, and tried to find a spot to relax for the day. The lake is actually super full this time of year, so most of the beach was underwater. This was actually quite a nice thing, since it meant that there weren’t too many people there and all the beaches were broken into little tiny hidden beaches. We found a fun secret spot and hunkered down:

The water did not look very clean, so we set up on the mini-beach and sunbathed for a few hours. Occasionally people would go past on their boats or paddle boards for our amusement:

After a few hours we were extremely hot and sweaty since it was boiling hot and I refused to move into the shade, so once we left our mini-beach we had to make a desperate dash for liquids. Fortunately, you are never far from a bar in the US!

Rob is still being an absolute hero and not drinking any sodas, but alas I was not so strong. In fact I was extremely unsupportive and chugged down like five pints of coca cola right in front of him, bad wife. It did bring me back to life though, and we had a good time laughing at Rob’s beer. For reasons unknown Budweiser has renamed itself ‘America’ for the next few months, because why not.

We also got some fries, because so sue me.

Anyway, after our tasty break we went down to a beach in front of the bar and found an even better secret place to call our own.

We set up our chairs and towels again, and read in the shade like the old people that we are. You could see more of the lake from here and there were more boats going past, plus there were lots of rocks so you could hear more gentle splashing. It was very zen 🙂

After some more reading we decided that we should at least touch the lake itself, so did a little paddling and jumping around on the rocks:

It was lots of fun, and as of yet we’re not showing any signs of parasitic infection. Anyone who gets in touch to let me know what parasites we might have (DAD) will be responded to harshly :p

After a little while we had to dry off and head back to the car for our drive back home.

We were lucky enough to see this little bird friend before he left, so once again we play name that bird:

Lake McConaughy is actually very famous for it’s bird watching, and has all sorts of rare birds that live there. However I don’t know anything more than that about it, since it was and is too hot to use my brain. Maybe we will take a more bird focused approach next time 😉

Anyway, we made it home safely and had a great time! We’re now working on planning our next adventures, so watch this space 🙂

Much Love! Xx

Hi All!

A short update on our weekend so far! This Saturday the weather is extremely beautiful here in Fort Collins, it’s 85°F (29.5°C) with bright sunshine and blue skies, so much fun was had!

Rob’s dubious idea of fun was a grueling 28.5km bike ride around the reservoir, with an alarmingly fast top speed of 35 mph on the steep downhill bits. It does not look like an easy cycle:

But he said he had a very good time, and saw a horse, a donkey, and some people tubing down to Poudre river! We have not yet tried tubing, but are very keen to do so since it looks like a lot of fun:

I decided not to sacrifice my body to bike riding, and luckily got an offer to go a Medieval Fair with my friends Jeny & Linda from work! This sounded like a lot of fun, and something I have never done before, so off we went.

Unlike most fairs there was a very relaxed approach to clothing, so it didn’t matter that we weren’t dressed in costume. A few people did make the effort and were in full medieval dress, but good lord did they look warm:

Also unlike most fairs, this took place just next to the beautiful ‘Devil’s Backbone’ in Loveland, which is a really pretty geological feature. There are tall rocks which rise up along a naturally occuring hill, making the whole thing look like a monster spine:

The fair itself was really lovely. It was mostly small stalls in tents with people selling homemade goods, and there was lots of great stuff. I bought a wooden painting of the Colorado flag to hang up, and the others got some great jewellery.

As well as the cute shops they had lots of performances, including Belly Dancing:

And sword fighting!

We were pretty tempted by the sword fighting, but it was far too hot to be leaping around fighting. We had a glass of Mead instead 🙂

After that we wandered the fair for a few more hours shopping away and taking pictures with the cool outfits and prop jails…

 

Afterwards we went and got ice cream to bring our body temperatures after our baking in the sun, and agreed to do it again soon!

Tomorrow we are going to be day tripping across to Nebraska, so we hope to have more exciting pictures for you tomorrow 🙂

Much Love Xx

 

When friends and family come out to visit us, we like to do different and interesting things. But also, we like to do things with people that they could not do in England. For example, hiking in the mountains is a very Colorado thing to do.

So, with the cousins here, we received a very kind offer from one of me and Cats closest friends here, to try something we had never even considered before:
Now, before we go any further, a few things to point out for those of high blood pressure or of concern for our wellbeing or safety:

1. We are fine.
2. No really, we still have the correct number of limbs and no extra holes.
3. We took a very safety first approach and spent almost as much time going over proper gun safety and use, as shooting.
4. Don’t. Worry.

Anyway, we first learnt and were made to demonstrate the three rules of gun safety. ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction, ALWAYS keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot and ALWAYS keep the gun unloaded until ready to use.

There are also other general rules like don’t drink and shoot, wear eye and ear protection (guns are like, well loud) and of course; never point a gun at something you don’t want to shoot!

We then went to a gun range out in East Colorado and did some target practice:

The kickback of the pistols (Smith and Wesson Revolver and Glock 27) was surprisingly large, hence why me and Cat aren’t shooting one handed like James bond or something…
Simon however, is a lot stronger than us and showed us how it was done. It does really put all the video games, American TV and films in perspective though. After shooting about 5 rounds my hands were tired and my brain hurt from concentrating. I have absolutely no idea how people do this for real!

We then moved on to some larger guns. Fortunately, this involved sitting down with some 25 yard targets which turned yellow when you hit them:
We were quite happy with that grouping considering it was our first time and that was using a Ruger semi-automatic rifle which had no sight, so was difficult to aim. I should also point that the target that says ‘rope’ is actually mine. When we took Smraizle to Silver Grill on their first day here, I asked four times to book a table under Rob but ‘Rope’ is what the woman choose to hear and write down.

Cat, Simon and Marie didn’t think this was funny at all, and defo did not spend the rest of the holiday calling me Rope McCannon and creating a complete backstory… Anyway, I think we all look quite serious here with the big guns (Ruger sem-automatic rifle and Remington bolt action rifle), if we were American, these would be great profile pics:
Talking of kickback, the bigger the gun, the bigger the kickback, hence why sitting down and having the back of the rifle in your shoulder helps, though we did have some small bruises on our shoulders to remember the day by.

Finally, we are very grateful to John for the experience. Here he is demonstrating his shotgun:
I include a picture of him here not us, as his expression is serious and concentrating and ours was more like panic and anticipation like this guy:

That was some experience!

Rob and Cat xx

Hi Again!

We’re continuing fun times in Fort Collins with the cousins, so time for an update. On Tuesday we partook in the main form of entertainment in Fort Collins – Brewery Tours! Fort Collins has a population of around 150,000, and a magnificent 21 breweries – so around one brewery for each 7100 people 🙂 This doesn’t compare to the number of restaurants (about 400, so one for every 375 people), but still pretty outstanding!

We started at New Belgium, which is my personal favorite and somewhere that you will definitely all be visiting, to do their free tour! It lasts about 90 minutes, contains tasters of many, many beers and is extremely informative. Plus the New Belgium Brewery is just beautiful and the people are so relaxed, so it’s always fun 😀

We started the tour by learning a little about the background of the brewery, which as you can imagine is aiming to produce Belgium style beer in Colorado. Since they started in 1991 they’ve grown massively, and you may have tasted one of their most popular ales which is Fat Tire. We then went on to taste several of their other beers, of which they have a fabulous range:

We then continued to drink as we walked around the rest of the site in the lovely sunshine, and it was great.

After all the drinking we were feeling a little sleepy:

But we partied on. Next stop, Odells!

Odells is another of the most famous breweries in Fort Collins, and widely considered one of the real local treasures. They also do a great range of beers, and have a really beautiful site. We were too late to do their brewery tour, so we tried a few of their taster flights instead and also got some tacos! All whilst enjoying their wonderful patio:

The taster flights were pretty wonderful, and they had a really good variety. Here are some of their tasty beers:

As you can imagine we were even more sleepy leaving the brewery:

But we continued on to Cooper Smiths, which is a brewery in the Old Town Square. It’s very pretty, and has a great games room! We had a great time playing snooker, followed by the magical game that is Shuffleboard 🙂

We played the traditional way – Guys vs Gals – and I’m proud to say that the gals won both rounds! At that point the guys accepted their inarguable inferiority, so we moved on to the also exciting table tennis. Here there were no measurable winners, but the loser was definitely the guy playing pool next to us who was repeatedly struck by our ball, usually in the face mid-shot. We spent a lot of the game apologising.

To restore our dignity we had a few rounds of table football to finish the night. We played Channons vs Cheethams, and Channons just scraped victory over the few games. See if you can spot the common player amongst the winning teams! That night, we slept well 🙂

We continued the fun on Friday with the Fort Collins Foodie Walk! This is a self guided walking tour of some of the food stores in Fort Collins which happens once a month, put on by the stores. They offer free samples and tell you more about their shops, and since they are truly hipster style shops this is pretty exciting. One big highlight is the Tea Store, which is truly wonderful:

There is also an extremely fancy Olive Oil shop, will sells an absurd range of olive oil.

And yet somehow everything in all of these million bottles is interesting and delicious. Again, you must visit and sample if you come to Colorado. Here is Marie loving the balsamic vinegar:

We also visited the chocolate stop, the cheese shop, another chocolate shop and the spices/ liqueur store! Sadly we were too busy feasting to be vigilant with the pictures, so that’s on me…

After the food tour, we went on to get some pizza at the delicious pizza shop Slyce. This was enjoyed by all, but especially by Simon:

It really is top quality pizza. We followed this up by sharing a toffee apple, which we enjoyed initially but soon came to regret. Still, it merited a try:

After this second round of feasting we decided a walk around Old Town was needed. They’ve just added new flowers to the square and some lovely lights, so it looks rather fabulous:

But yes, so pretty! We ended the night with a drink at a new distillery that has just opened near our apartment called Mobb Mountain. It turns out to make extremely strong Whisky, Gin that tasted like Whiskey, and cocktails that are composed almost entirely of Whiskey. I’m not a big fan of Whiskey so only managed a sip of my cocktail, but the interior was beautiful and I love what they are trying to do!

So yes, just some of the delicious fun available in Fort Collins! More of our adventures to follow soon 🙂

Much love xx

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

We have had a fun few weeks recently coinciding with the varied but improving weather here.

HORSETOOTH HALF

Starting of this crazy time was that I finally did my Half Marathon (see here for background). Unfortunately, Fort Collins decided that the weekend was a really good time for some snow and cold weather (10 C) which made it a lot more challenging (wet feet = blisters), but I did finish in 2h 26 m 23 s without walking or coming last which was nice.

Here I am looking a bit worse for wear with about 100 meters to go and at the end looking like my feet arn’t in a bad way, with a winning medal / bottle opener:

 

And here I am just after, wide awake, looking really happy with my efforts at lunch at IHOP (the international house of pancakes):

Best of all was that the race was won by a woman – Brianne Nelson – in 1h 16m 44s, so big props to her! http://www.coloradorunnermag.com/2016/04/19/brianne-nelson-wins-horsetooth-half-marathon/

FORT FUN

We then discovered there was a place only 5 minutes from our house called Fort Fun.

It’s fun! Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pauldineen/161456714

Although probably aimed at people slightly (or arguably a lot) younger than us, we had a great time as they have arcades, mini golf courses, paddle boats, a big slide, laser tag, go karts and best of all… batting cages.

Cat actually did pretty well and hit a lot more than I did on the slow softball setting. I’m moderately ashamed to say I actually found it quite difficult (on the medium softball setting), as the bats and balls are different to cricket and without gloves, my hand hurt from the contact – such shame.

ST GEORGE’S DAY

Finally, we decided to throw a St George’s day party for our friends, partly to be social and show off our digs, but mainly to see what our American friends thought British people looked like. To be honest, we looked more like a Halloween party than an English one:

We were brought some spotted dick, biscuits, tea, and variety of English beers (e.g. Old Speckled Hen, Holy Grail) and managed to play a few classic Channon party games (consequences, the chocolate game and the Maltesers spoon game) which went down very well, as they always do. Though I did feel sorry for one guest who kept having her hat taken off just as she was about to get some Chocolate, every single time:

 

As far as “British themed fancy dress”, big props have to go to the innovative ones e.g. Abbey Road, a Palace Guard, a Corgi, Where’s Wally, Zombie Princess Diana and three of the Spice Girls. One guy dressed as Angus Young (Scottish) from ACDC (an Australian Rock band), but that was all good. Cat decided to dress as me, which was actually really disturbing. Especially so with the drawn on chest and facial hair and some very unflattering impressions “Ello I’m Dr Rob, can I talk to you about cricket?”

Perhaps we need to do a better job of teaching our friends our culture…

Rob & Cat

Wotcha!

Last Friday, our friends Jaclyn and Willie invited us to see an American event that we had not previously even really been aware of; the Toughest Monster Truck Tour. My words cannot possibly do justice to just how fantastically American this event was, but I will do my best:

It took place in an Ice Hockey arena where local Colorado team “The Eagles” play in a town south of Fort Collins called Loveland. Before the event even started, everyone stood up and sang the National anthem towards a big US flag, then the announcer made all the Veterans in the audience stand up and have a round of applause from the audience for protecting our freedom. We were surprised and impressed by the patriotism (considering most English people don’t even know the words to the 2^nd and 3^rd verses of God Save The Queen) and we thought the applause was very sweet, although neither of us knew the words to the anthem!

Anyway, the trucks themselves were massive, like really really big and impressive:

• Size: 10 ft high, 12 ft wide, 18 ft long
• Weight: 9,500 lbs (roughly 3 mini coopers, and even the tires weight 500 kilos!)
• 1750 Horsepower
• Fuel: Methanol (56 yards to the gallon!)
• 572 cu in Ford Racing V8 engine, with a 871 BDS supercharger, in a Ford F150 body.

The sound was ridiculous and everyone had earmuffs on. Also the cars were really getting through fuel, so the whole arena smelt of weird nitro/alcohol fumes. We were lucky enough to see the tour championship and see 6 Monster Trucks (Big Foot, Quad Chaos, Heavy Hitter, Over Bored, Dirt Crew and Dawg Pound) perform three challenges;

Best wheelie:

A knockout race for fastest Truck:

And a freestyle round featuring some fantastic air:

The eventual winner – Big Foot 22 driven by Dan Runte – stormed the show and won his 5^th consecutive championship (Big Foot is also the original Monster Truck so that was pretty cool), although he might have been beaten by 2^nd place ‘Heavy Hitter’ had its front left tire not become detached from the axle half way through his freestyle performance!

Not wishing to let people’s adrenaline return to safe levels at half time, we were treated to a BMX and Freestyle Motocross show featuring some cool BMX backflips (which we didn’t get a picture of) and some pretty impressive Motocross stunts:

My favourite was actually this one below. The resolution isn’t great, but the driver us actually lead down on his bike with his hands behind his head like he is napping:

How is one expected to get a decent night’s sleep after all that excitement?

Rob

Hi Again,

You’ve almost reached the end of our adventures with the extra Channons, but we definitely have some more great pictures to show you before we’re done. After our week skiing we all headed back to Fort Collins, so that we could show Barry and Margaret our wonderful town.

As you may know we adore Fort Collins, so we were very keen to show them the sights. As well as that our local area has a staggering number of things to see, so there was plenty to keep us all busy.

First, we went to see Estes Park which we have visited previously. We had a great time even though everything was still very much under 50 inches of snow, including visiting this awesome frozen waterfall:

Not pictured in the shot is the small child that was sitting behind the waterfall refusing to come out. The two people on the left are the concerned parents, who were trying to convince their son to stop trying to knock icicles above his head…

Still, it was a beautiful day! We enjoyed a life of contradiction, spending the first half of the walk around tutting at people being loud whilst we quietly watched the wonderful birds, including several of these pretty guys:

We then decided we’d had our fill of sophistication and birds and started lobbing snowballs at each other and making a right scene. Heartwarmingly, we managed to inspire a Sri Lankan family who were visiting and had never conceived of such an idea! They started having a big snow ball fight of their own and seemed to have a great time. I’m ashamed to say I was most definitely not the winner of our showdown, but I did get a couple of great shots in! Tired out, we walked around and enjoyed the rest of the park in a more sedate and respectable manor:

As well as Estes Park, we went further south to see Manitou Springs (a very cute town) and Garden of the Gods. Both were excellent, despite the scorching hot weather! You can feel that summer is starting to kick in a little now, so hats all round.

It was very pretty, and we walked around the town for a while before stopping for lunch. Our lunch included some of the local spring water that the town is famous for, which tasted very fresh and lovely! I also finally caved and bought a Cowboy hat to keep me cool, which is actually extremely practical at keeping the sun off my face. I love it so 🙂

After Manitou Springs we went just around the corner to Garden of the Gods, an amazing national park.

Garden of the Gods is quite unusual in that it features a lot of tall and strange rock features, often features which seem very unlikely. Here is one of the most famous views, the balancing rock:

It was hard to get far enough away to take the picture properly, but needless to say it’s a pretty big rock balancing on a pretty small one!

With all these rocks around climbing was inevitable, and extremely good fun:

Selfies were of course also inevitable, but we had to wait until Barry wasn’t watching so that he couldn’t be disappointed in us…

We also spent far longer hiking than expected! We parked the car so that we could step out and have a quick look and ended up hiking for well over an hour. It really was gorgeous. Here are just a few of these wonderful sights:

So yes, super pretty and a new must visit spot for us to take visitors to!

Sadly despite our best efforts and wonderful tours we didn’t manage to convince the parents to illegally defect and stay in Fort Collins forever, so they are now safely back in the UK. That said it was a magical two weeks and we had such a good time, so we’re looking forward to convincing them to visit again soon!

That’s all for now, more soon 🙂

Xx