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

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

It has been two months since my last five-things post and I felt it time for another. Let’s see what I have learnt since.

1. Every day I’m shuffling

So several times we had been in bars over December and seen a long board in the side of the bar and wondered what it was.

Turns out it is a bar game called shuffleboard. America still has pool but it doesn’t have darts, so I guess this is kind of the US version of darts. This is also a good comparison as the game is lots of fun, a little silly and is best (and most often) played inebriated by people who are really rubbish at it.

For anyone who is coming out to visit us, you will be forced to play this game. The rules are really simple (you have to roll it to the end without it going off  – a bit like curling / skittles) and it’s good fun, so don’t fret.

2. Take me out

Now the US has a reputation for having massive meals. I previously assumed that Americans managed to stay thin by not snacking as much as the English. Turns out I was mostly wrong. America has lots of sweets and chocolate (candy) but there is a very clever system for dealing with massive portions:

Some restaurants even have it down to a T, like my favourite ‘Mexican’ place – Cafe Mexicali. Their burritos come in foil boxes and are way too big to finish. But after you finish you just put a foil top on the box and you have a ready-made take home box for lunch the next day.

Disclaimer – this assumes you don’t be a fatty (me and Cat’s term for eating all the food even if you feel awful afterwards and continue eating once you are full up).

3. Welcome to the (jungle) bus stop

I can’t remember if I have mentioned this before, but I was stood at the bus stop in December and all of a sudden noticed some really strange noises coming from a lamppost. Here is a recording from my phone (bear in mind it is about 3 times louder in person and at least 4 times weirder):

I have no idea what these are supposed to be or their purpose, but I guess it’s one of:

• The builders of the Fort Collins transport system are really into Jungle music
• There is a miniature jungle inside every bus stop in Fort Collins
• The sounds are to scare birds / squirrels / bears away

No clue…

4. American Comfort

One thing that America has absolutely down to a T is comfort. For example, many cinemas have electronic recliners and moveable side tables to eat your food off of.

Also, if you go to many supermarkets, they automatically bag your groceries for free. Almost every car I have been is has at least 2 drinks holders between the front seats… ok this one isn’t that special but it’s A LOT easier holding a coffee or ice smoothie in a cup holder than between your legs as me and Cat used to in our old Micra!

5. Language part 2

So I know I have posted about English vs American before, and I know it’s obvious, but even now after living here for 3 months I continue to not speaking the language correctly.

Some aspects of this are just plain annoying. For example I just went and bought Cat a Hazlenut Mocca with marshmallows from Starbucks today. I asked for it and the server had no idea what I wanted, so I had to translate. Whereas Brits prounounce it “Mocka”, Americans pronounce it “Moe-cah”.

How to do it properly apparently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4XcN7-Ocxs

They even have “English muffins“, which we don’t even have in England? It’s like a crumpet but cooked on both sides, definetly not a muffin though, It’s so confusing!

The one me and Cat have been working on most is ‘sorry’. It’s not that Brits are in any way more polite than Americans, but nobody here would do the following:

• Somebody gets in your way as you are trying to get past, you say sorry as you squeeze through as if it was your fault.
• You are ahead of somebody in a queue, e.g. at a microwave to make lunch. You say sorry to apologise for existing and stopping the rest of the queue from eating.
• Yesterday I was playing volleyball in a local recreation league. After making a shot I walked backwards to get out of the way the next shot and tripped over another player falling flat on my back. Did I need to say sorry for causing myself to fall over? No. Did I anyway? Of course, we are British good sir!!!

So we have had to just keep quiet or replace ‘sorry’ with ‘ok’

It’s not all bad though, for some unknown reason American’s quite like the British accent.

I was told today that the way I say ‘chocolate’ sounds lovely. Also Americans absolutely love Downtown Abbey and they have just gotten Bake Off on the US Netflix, so I think it’s just an obsession with polite posh British people.

Still, I never thought my Bristol-twanged accent would be described as lovely!

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