A Day in FoCo (Saturday, February 6th, 2016)

Work, weather and illness have been taking a toll on us for the last few weeks, and have kept us at home. But today, we are finally heading up to Fort Collins, Colorado to see our youngest daughter. And the best part is our oldest daughter is coming with us. It is rare for the four of us to have a chance to spend a day together, but today is the day! We are very excited!

Our plan is for a lunch date. Our youngest daughter gets to choose, and she said that it’s between Thai and Afghani food. We have an Afghani restaurant that we eat at a lot in Fort Collins. It is a mix between fast food and sit down, and is a nice healthy alternative to normal fast food. We have never tried the Thai restaurant before, so it will be interesting to see which one she chooses.

We left home at about 10:45 and headed to Fort Collins. The roads were great the whole way, with no snow on the highway at all. We always take the Prospect Street exit because it has a welcome center with nice facilities, which is a bonus when you’ve had a big cup of coffee on the road. As we pulled into Fort Collins we were surprised to see how much snow they still had. Our snow in Denver has melted off a lot, but the Fort Collins roads are still very messy.

We got to our daughter’s apartment at noon, and delivered some food to her. Since she has to eat gluten free, I always try to make at least a few meals for her to help her with her cooking. She can’t just run out and grab fast food if she is having a busy day, so I like to keep a few things in her freezer to help her out in a bind. Today's biggest surprise for her was gluten free bagels from Trader Joe's and strawberry cream cheese.  Yum!

When she jumped in the car, she decided that we were going for our usual Afghani lunch. So off we headed to Maza Kabob. The owner is a very nice man from Afghanistan, who always greets us with a smile and always comes around to make sure we are enjoying the food. We love that he takes so much pride in his restaurant. 

They have a lunch special for $5.95, which we think is a good deal. It has a main, a side, rice and a small helping of Afghani salad. Three of us chose the Chicken Korma which is diced chicken in a korma sauce and one chose the Kafta Korma which is a seasoned meatball in korma sauce.  We ordered at the counter, then chose a table at which to sit.  Within five minutes the owner of the restaurant was delivering our meals to our table and chatting with us as he always does.  We love that we can get a hot healthy meal so quickly and it's all gluten free.

As we got ready to leave the restaurant, I decided to use the restroom, and was very surprised at its layout! It was very clean, but not what I expected. You see so many different things in different countries, but I didn’t expect this in a restroom in the U.S. We all decided that we would just have to go in one at a time even though there was room for two.

We have obviously never used the restrooms here before, because we would have remembered this!

It was too cold to spend much time outside today, so after lunch we decided to go to the Fort Collins mall. It has been an older mall for many years, and many of the shops have closed, but for the last few years, they have been re-doing it, and it is turning out very nicely. There is still quite a bit of empty space in the new mall, but it has definitely filled up since the last time we were here.

We started out at Nordstrom Rack, where everyone seemed to find something, except for me, so I think that would be a pretty successful shopping trip. The most successful part was that we had a chance to walk and talk and just spend some time together in the warmth of the mall. We hit several more stores, but were all shopped out, so we just did lots of looking and talking.

After a nice afternoon together, Steve suggested that we get dessert somewhere before we took our youngest daughter back home. We suggested the Chocolate Café, see our post from August 15th, 2015. But everyone thought that sounded too big and rich (if that's possible), so we ended up doing a build your own yogurt sundae at TCBY. They offer four sizes, but we all chose the tiny, and it turned out to be the perfect sized treat on which to end our day.