Beautiful Colorado (Sunday, October 25th, 2015)

It's harder than we realized to stay in touch with everyone when we are away, but we've had fun catching up since we've been back.  My first big event (which I've missed out on last month) was coming home to bunco.  It was hosted at a good friends house, and was a Halloween theme.  We had a wonderful dinner, played a couple games of bunco, and of course everyone dressed for the occasion!  I was the underachiever since I had just returned to town, but luckily no one judged me too harshly.  Our group has been doing monthly bunco for eight years now.

Our whole group

Catherine Hepburn, Sonny and Cher and Edward Scissor Hands!!!

Bat Woman, The Devil and Edward again

Our youngest daughter's boy friend plays hockey and last night he had a game in the Denver area, so we (along with our oldest daughter) headed down there to watch his game against another local university. We got to see his parents and many of his grandparents as well while we were there.  It was a very close game, and really fun to watch, and his team ended up winning by one point.

This morning we headed up to Steve's parents cabin in mountains. They are going to close down the cabin for the winter, and we really wanted to help them.  The trip up was really fun.  Since it was a really nice morning, everyone was out enjoying the warmth.

A para-sail up for a morning ride

And a hot air balloon right by the highway

The first signs of winter are appearing in the mountains, but it's still warm in the city.

A grazing deer by the side of the road

The biggest job at the cabin was getting the water shut off and drained.  It's not hard, but just takes some time.  We took the time to write down the instructions, so that if anyone else ever needs to do it nothing will be forgotten.  We also flipped over the outdoor furniture, vacuumed and mopped, closed all the curtains, moved some furniture, and raked up pine needles.

What a great wheel barrow.  A little hard to push though!

Cleaning up pine needles

After all of the work was done, Steve's parents took us for a nice lunch at a little restaurant called the Sportsman.  It's only open four days a week for four-hours per day this time of year, but most of the tables were full, which was really nice to see.  It's hard for businesses in this part of the mountains to succeed through the winter months.  There just aren't many people up here.

Lunch Time!

And then on our way home, we stopped to see our youngest daughter.  We were pretty dirty and sweaty, so we didn't really want to do too much, so we just went over to the local park and hung out for awhile.  The trees were all very beautiful.

Typical kid, she got up easily, but couldn't figure out how to get back down

New York?

We're finding that our time in Colorado is always very busy.  Either I'm catching up on work, or we're catching up with friends, and family or we're once again tackling the never-ending yard work. No matter how much time we plan at home, we feel like we're hurrying through it.  But maybe that's just the nature of this retirement beast!