Hello all,

Sorry to keep you waiting so long on part two! We have been far too busy having fun with Barry and Margaret, but will be catching up on our blogging this weekend 🙂

So, back to Steamboat! At the end of the last blog we’d just returned from Dinosaur, so were ready to get back to skiing. Or more accurately the boys were going to go skiing, and Margaret and I were going to see the sights!

The first wonderful sight that we saw was Strawberry Springs, arguably the most famous hot springs in Steamboat. These are natural hot springs up in the mountains that have been carefully structured to provide pools of spring water at a range of temperatures for lovely bathing. They are awesome:

You can see the big main pool in the foreground is only very slightly heated (and so is slightly iced over) whereas the raised pool is steaming quite a lot. You may also notice that outside of the springs was rather chilly, which made the prospect of putting on a tiny bikini and running through the snow towards the pool a little daunting. Still, bravely we entered the pool!

The walk down to the pool may be the coldest I have ever been, and first entering the springs was probably the hottest. The ambient temperature was about 20°F (-7°C) and the hot spring shown was at 105°F (41°C). I use Fahrenheit because it sounds way more impressive to say that there was an 85°F temperature increase, although now that I think of it a sudden 48°C temperature increase also sounds like a lot!

Anyway, once we were in it was absolutely beautiful. The springs are very remote so it was nice and quiet, and there are lots of little waterfalls that feed the pools into each other so you can hear them bubbling away, as well as the lovely birds that were flitting around. The only thing that could, and did, drag me away was the hour long massage provided in the naturally heated stone grotto. The grotto also had some of the hot spring water running through and under it, so you had more soothing sounds and nice warm stone underfoot. We even, bravely, did a cold plunge! Here we are after a few hours, looking very relaxed and rosy:

So yes, lovely! Meanwhile, the boys were shooting around on the mountains doing increasingly crazy runs through the trees in the very deep snow. It snowed about 16 inches while we were there, so it was at some points knee deep!

But fear not, our boys still were still skiing beautifully while Margaret and I were hard at work relaxing.

On seeing this pictures I did ask them if they were just lost, but they assure me that this is what advanced, off piste skiing looks like and that they were very capable of handling it. Although the next few pictures suggested otherwise!

 

We did laugh at the pictures of the fall, and then had a lot of fun playing the picture in reverse so that instead of slowly getting out from under the tree it looks like Barry slowly crawls under and buries himself. Perhaps he leant many things from George the mouse! But teasing aside this was the only fall during three days of extremely difficult skiing, so we were very impressed 🙂 Rob also fell over, but I’m afraid you will have to contact Barry for these pictures!

It was very nice and sunny on the last day, so Marg and I got the Gondola up the mountain to meet the boys for lunch and very well deserved beers:

And Marg was sensible whilst I had a poorly chosen Sangria:

The boys then returned to their shenanigans, and Marg and I had a short walk around the top of the mountain which was extremely beautiful!

We then had what was some of the most fun I’ve ever had, which was the Gondola ride back down the mountain! It is a great tribute to Margaret that she did not insist on riding in a separate carriage as I squealed like a child and threw my arms around. It was a lot like a rollercoaster – the carriage starts moving in the bay, then the floor drops away and it accelerates wildly! I had far too much of a good time:

And obviously, it was completely beautiful the whole way down. It was so much fun that, with Marg’s reluctant permission, once we got to the bottom of the Gondola I insisted on going round again. Since having an English accent in the US is a little like having a superpower, the guy very kindly let us go around twice.

I was so happy. Although a little embarrassed when I had to explain to the boys why our 20 minute trip home took just under an hour! Still, worth it. It turns out the boys also had a fun journey down, meeting/ almost crashing into two Moose on the way!

These were excellent pictures and we were very impressed and jealous. We also debated how to pluralize a collective of Moose for some time. I was sticking to my guns with “A bunch of Mooses” but sadly common sense prevailed with the relatively dull “A herd of Moose”.

For dinner, after a tiring week all round, we went to an amazing Steakhouse for dinner called 8th Street Steakhouse.

This was a very fun place, were you actually cook your own steak on the big hot grill provided. As someone who works in food safety this was a little alarming for me, but so much fun! They had a butcher style counter where you pick your steak, and the lovely New York man talks you through each one. Luckily the lovely New York man tells you how to cook your steak in great detail, so that you don’t fluff it up. Next, you head to the grill!

And then, at least in our case, you have a whale of a time taking silly pictures while waiting for the steak to cook:

We were doing very little to off-set the stereotype that all British people are silly. Eventually, our steaks were cooked and we could enjoy them. I was very proud of my effort, and enjoyed the steak all the more for it.

At the end of the night we managed to squeeze in a little dessert, and then back to the condo to pass out. It was a wonderful end to a wonderful week!

The next morning, we packed our bags and headed back to sunny Fort Collins to show our parents the town we love so much. Stay tuned for our sunnier escapades, which will be up very shortly! Thank you for reading 🙂

Xxx

Hello!

As you may know we are currently on a lovely holiday with the Channons, skiing in Steamboat Springs. It is BEAUTIFUL, although also extremely snowy!

Steamboat itself is about three hours East of us (it would be closer, but you have to go around the Rocky Mountains) and is internationally renowned as an amazing place to ski. As well as the massive Mount Werner where the ski resort is there are a few other skiing areas, as well as some lovely Hot Springs, which is what the town is named after. There are no actual steamboats, the bubbling springs just make it sound like there are 🙂

I mentioned that Mount Werner is massive, but that probably doesn’t do it justice! The town itself is at 6,732 ft above sea level, but the peak of the mountain is at 10,570 ft! The highest point that you can get to via skiing is near that, at around 10,384 ft. So, quite a long way to ski down! Although this was put into perspective for us when we found out that there are people to eschew the long gondola rides to the top in favor of hiking up the 3,500 ft themselves! Needless to say, we did not…

At Barry’s alarming request we started strong on the first day (Monday) having arrived to our wonderful Condo on the Sunday night! So we got up at eight, snaffled down some toast, and off we went on the first lift:

And away we went! I’m still really not good at skiing so wasn’t anywhere near the guys standard, but they indulged me with some nice Blues and Greens to get us started! Here I am, looking sort of like I know what I’m doing:

A lot of the runs are very nice and wide like this one, which makes it much easier for a beginner like me to control my speed by making lots of turns. We skied down a lot of fun runs like this, with brief breaks on the chairlift to rest our legs! After a few hours, we took a nice break up on the mountain. There are a few places to eat dotted all over the slopes that are only accessible via skis, and they had wonderful views! Here is Rendezvous, where we stopped:

And here we are enjoying a beverage in the sun! It was an extremely sunny day which is how we ended up a little pink, but we definitely appreciated the warmth 🙂 One of the reasons that I was a bit apprehensive about skiing was that I thought it would be very cold – rest assured that this is definitely not the case! You can see that as soon as we could we threw our ski jackets to the floor and enjoyed the sunshine:

And then back to it! The preferred approach to skiing with Team Channon is to get the first lift up as mentioned, and to then keep skiing until the lifts close at around 4pm with plenty of snack breaks in the middle. Skiing is pretty exhausting, so doing a full eight hours was a bit of a shock to my squishy body! Still, much fun 🙂 🙂

In the evening we explored Downtown Steamboat, with its amazing food and beer! For the next day it was more of the same, although at a gentler pace since my poor legs were a little tired.

Strangely, Barry managed to pick up a hitch-hiker during a slower phase of skiing! Meet our new friend George:

We think we picked George up when he fell out of one of the toboggans, which was probably quite a rude awaking from what we assume was his hibernation. We suspect George is a Doormouse, and a very cute (if slightly mussed up) one at that! Upon being woken up and finding himself in the snow he quickly ran over to Barry and hid in the little well under his shoe, and we think planned to stay there until spring. It was extremely cute!

I was all in favour of us adopting George and having him live with us forever, but sadly common sense prevailed and we decided to scoot over to the edge of the slope and shoo him into the trees. This turned out to be much harder than expected. To start, Barry skied over to the edge of the slope, with George now riding on the back of the skis:

This turned out to not be the most secure place for a little mouse, and he fell off into the middle of the run! He then sat there waiting for Barry to rescue him, which Barry did accompanied by his new assistants – a bunch of young school girls having skiing lessons! As you can imagine, some chaos ensued. Luckily George safely made it to the trees in the end!

For a bit of a change of pace after all the skiing excitement we took a day off to go and visit Dinosaur National Park, which is on the border of Colorado and Utah. As well as being a naturally very beautiful area, Dinosaur is so named because of the large collection of dinosaur bones that have been found there, many of which have been kept in situ for visitors! This all sounded very exciting, so off we went to Utah:

It was about a two and a half hour drive, but well worth it. First, we were very impressed by the Dinosaur on display, which we lovingly named Cuthbert.

After a quite long discussion about whether his colouring was accurate (unlikely, but hard to know for sure), we headed on into the actual park.

As I said, the main feature is the big wall of dinosaur bones that have been kept in situ on display. The whole park used to be a river, and so a large number of dinosaur skeletons were located in the river bed either as a result of a flash flood, or a drought. Over the year some of these skeletons drifted apart into individual bones, but others remain in their original shape. When the river bed dried up the bones were buried, and they were excavated in the early 1900s. A lot of the bones we had seen without realising it, including the Barosaurus that is famously on display in the Natural History Museum in New York! But back to the wall:

It was a little bit mind-blowing, and it was fascinating to look at it and slowly be able to pick out individual animals. Strongly recommend a visit if you are in the area!

As well as the dinosaur bones, there were some ancient Petroglyphs! This is art that has been carved into a rock surface, in a similar style to cave art. Again, it was a little mind-blowing to think that these carvings had been around for such a long time, and they were very interesting! There were a few of them scattered around the park, so we did a tour of these. The style is very distinct, and often they are quite high up on the cliff walls:

The rest of the park is also very beautiful, you can tell that the whole landscape has had millions of years to take shape. This post will very much become a photo album from now on, since the pictures really speak for themselves! There were some super distinctive layers in the rock:

Split Mountain, so called because the rocks are at an angle, which shows a really excellent range of rock colours. Again, it is really hard to capture the scale of this, but at least I’m using my own photos this time 😉

This awesomely named Turtle Rock, which again caused much debate about whether or not it did resemble a Turtle:

The even more tenuously named Elephant Toes Butte:

And finally, general awe inspiring beauty:

So yes, much fun! We were in the park for a good long time exploring the many lovely things before returning back to Steamboat for the second half of our wonderful holiday!

We are here until Sunday, so hold tight for Part 2 of Steamboat!

Xxxxxx

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! 🙂

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

If you have ever met me and Cat, you will know that I love cricket. I know that most people think it is boring and not exercise, but I don’t care, I love it. However, there is no cricket in America,* so I have had to adopt new forms of exercise. My thought process was:

• Q. What are main American sports? A. American football, ice hockey, basketball and baseball.
• Issues: I’m not tough enough for Foosball, am not coordinated enough on the ice to skate backwards, I’m not 7 foot tall and I am not excited about a watered down version of cricket (queue long banter arguments like this one).
• What other sports can I find?

In February, I was asked to join a volleyball team with friends from my work. I stupidly thought, “yea volleyball how hard can that be?” even though not only have I never played before, but I have never even seen a match.

It’s difficult to put into words how entertaining and frustrating it is to not be able to do something that seems like it should be easy. The only thing I can equate this too is when you are injured or ill and you find basic tasks like walking / dealing with stairs / cooking difficult.

I am still fairly rubbish, but our team have won 5 games and lost 13 so far (which is apparently much better than last season!) so that’s not too bad. Everyone is coaching me lots as well which is very nice.

Colorado is actually the fittest state in the US with a 20% obesity rate (compared to 35% in Mississippi and 25% in the UK). Part of this is because everyone LOVES cycling and running here. It also helps that it is very pretty and ~5000 ft above sea level.

In fact Cat has taken the sensible decision to join a local gym (maybe 20 meters from our front door) which is nextdoor to a coctail bar / club. I however have joined the Fort Collins Running Club and decided I needed a target to get me going… so I signed up to the Horsetooth half marathon in April. It is a really beautiful run, around a reservoir and through the countryside finishing at a brewery 5 minutes from our flat/apartment.

The only problem is, it’s reeeeeeaaaaally hilly (353 m gain).

At least once you are up the top of the hills, it’s mostly downhill after, and a brewery at the end of the race is nice. Cat did take a picture of me after my first long run of the year, but I look such a mess and the internet does not need that picture (even if a certain Tyrannosaurus Peck thought it was hilarious).

4 Bonus Rob points if you got any of the pop-culture references in this one.

Rob

*In fact I found some Indian x-pats who play sometimes in Fort Collins in car parks with a tennis ball, but I was not invited to their muck-arounds. Also there are apparently only 6 proper cricket pitches in the country.

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!!!! 🙂 🙂

I know it can be quite tedious for readers of this blog to hear us saying – oooh look how different stuff it – all the time…

…having said that, here is a typical winter weekday morning in Fort Collins:

5.54 am text from university saying campus is closed for students and administrative staff today (but not for research staff like me) because of all the snow (we had 4 inches of snow yesterday daytime and another 4 inches last night).

7.30 am contemplate working from home / having a snow day, decide that need to do some work and love the snow so should go outside (though angry becuase can’t make snowballs as too dry).

7.35 am decide to drive in as too cold and slippery to cycle (-4 C) and can’t be bothered to wait for the bus (which still runs in the snow BTW).

8.00 am emerge from the apartment and realise that:

a) they have ploughed the roads during the night,

b) they have also cleared the sidewalk, (yes, ‘sidewalk’, not ‘pavement’)

c) our car is now trapped with a 3 foot layer of snow surrounding it.

8.25 am finish digging out the car, and regret wearing running shoes (as they are treaded and I have volleyball later) instead of walking shoes (which would have kept my ankles warm).

8.30 am call in my favourite coffee shop to get a fruit smoothie, because the cold never bothered me anyway.

8.40 am decide to park 10 minute walk from work as parking closer would require digging out my own space (smile at how quiet it is in the snow – no sound of mr train)

8.45 am help somebody with a front wheel drive car rock their car out of a space.

8.50 am laugh with international friends from work about snow and how crazily hot and humid it is in Brazil and Thailand where the other international student are from (fun fact 1: in Thailand, nobody has heaters in their home because it never gets cold enough to need them, fun fact 2: moving here is the first time my Brazilian friend had seen snow).

9.00 am establish that even though 8 inches of snow is enough to close campus, it is not enough to stop our volleyball recreational league match this evening, so that’s still on.

Rob

At Channon Christmas parties in years gone by, the tray game is played. Basically, a tray containing lots of silly items (e.g. scissors, golf ball, Lego man etc.) is placed in front of a room for 1 minute, then after being covered, everyone must guess what was on the tray.

I’ve always quite liked this game. It is fun, silly, quick and best of all: kids are as good at it as adults! (if you have scored 5 or less in the argument game for 10 years beside victories by Uncle Les, Evil Uncle Barry, Grampy Channon or Uncle Brynley, you will know where I’m coming from…)

Anyway, here is a ‘tray’ of British items we bought from an international shop in Fort Collins as we felt in need of some English delicacy’s. Try looking at the picture for 1 minute and guessing all 14 items (the kettle and toaster in the background do not count).

Did you guess them all? You should have 15 including the table (previously the tray) otherwise you lose, hard lines my friend.

I will not pretend it’s not quite shameful going and buying English things in America, but it did make us laugh and we really needed the gravy granules for a steak sauce. Also Americans think spotted dick sponge sounds hilarious so we had to get that.

Rob