a break in breck

oh wait… that makes it sound like someone might have broken something in Breckenridge.  Not so.  Simply that we were able to take a break and get away for the weekend in Breck.

Wait… that sounds like we went just the 2 of us.  Not quite.

ok… the weekend before last in honor of my impending 32nd birthday, we were finally able to take Will’s friend up on his offer to have all of us come up to the mountains and visit him while he’s living in his family’s vacation home.  Unfortunately for him but fortunately for us, he’s currently unemployed.

So we headed out on the Friday morning and got up there in 2 hours.  While it was snowing.  Apparently the snow showed up just for us ;-)

We didn’t do much and that was FANTASTIC!

We hung out at the house most of the time.

We went for a walk.

Miss Pea all bundled up in her snow suit in the sled.

Looking back at the house. 



Time to lay down for your nap… 


And… out.

The next day we got geared up and went snowshoeing.

She’s asleep in there and had been for quite awhile.

For the afternoon we headed into Breck itself.

isn’t she the cutest thing you’ve ever seen?!

There was a Mobius Strip as part of the 2012 Budweiser International  Snow Sculpture Championships.
She was asleep again by the time we got to the Breckenridge Brewery.

Mmmm… yummy shoe. 

You want to try it, Daddy?

And then we had to leave :(

So… who are you again?  And what is that on your face?

I guess he’s ok, Mom.


and some extraneous gorgeousness of the mountains before we got stuck in traffic for 4.5 hours to get home.  Note to self: ski/mountain traffic is exactly like East Coast beach traffic except during the wrong season.

Now… all those pictures should make up for all the wordy, boring posts lately. :-D

A weekend away

Will has a friend from Germany who is currently living in Breckenridge. We've been trying to come up and visit but it hadn't worked out. Well, it worked out great to come up for my birthday weekend.

Here's the view from the house. Gorgeous!

Oh and all the snow showed up just for us.

in which we are awesome. not.

so we thought we had this whole travelling with small child thing down and perhaps we got a mite cocky. 

Perhaps it’s the fact that the baby hasn’t let me have a break in over a week – vastly preferring me over her papa. 

Perhaps it’s that we took her off her reflux meds on Monday (on the advice of the doctor last week) and she was ok at first but now we aren’t so sure.

Perhaps she has an ear infection that we aren’t aware of.  But more likely not.

Perhaps I’ve been doing too much around the house this week trying to get things done – the front room ceiling is totally smooth and ready for primer and paint when Will gets home.

Perhaps we didn’t really need to load the whole fam up on a plane again to head east for the 3rd time in 4 weeks.  But this is a happy occasion so we were happy to do it.

Perhaps we simply need sleep.

But why are we not awesome?

Here is a small sampling of things we’ve done or not done today… that we are aware of:

- we forgot the big, fat, scary check for closing on the condo.

- we left the car seat base in the car in the DEN economy parking lot.  Don’t worry the car seat can be safely, but not easily, used without it.

- I left my keys at home.  Why would I need them? Oh, only to give them over at closing.  And no, they can’t just make more copies of the ones they have.  The front door keys are $75/key and I am required to provide 4 of them.

- the carefully packed milk so Paige can eat well while we attend the wedding managed to leak through their ziploc bags and the zippered cooler onto about half my wardrobe which I really tried to not overpack this time so there’s not much left that’s clean.

- AND my shampoo leaked in my toiletry case too.

BUT she was an angel on the plane as usual. 

And with a little kindness from strangers, we navigated familiar territory of Metrobus (B30 from BWI to Greenbelt Metro station), Metro (Green Line from Greenbelt to Mount Vernon Square where we transferred to Yellow to King Street) and the Old Town trolley to get to our hotel, not with ease but we did it.

It’s funny to be a tourist in a place where we so recently lived.  Though it took coming back here specifically to finally start calling Colorado “home.”

the davenport trail – day 5

After several days in Ohio, it finally came time to leave.  In another counter intuitive move, we headed back north.  This time to Michigan.

Along I-75 I had to snap a few pictures of some familiar, yet different, roadside landmarks.

The Flea Market now has bizarre giraffes all over the roof:

Butter Jesus, Touchdown Jesus, whatever you liked to call it is absolutely no more and so far is not being replaced:

Then we pushed on to Pure Michigan:

First we stopped to visit with the Briggses who were friends of ours in Virginia but moved back to Michigan late last year.  When we arrived Miss V was asleep…

Hard to believe that she’s already a year old.




V saying bye bye to P.  It was super cute!

Aw, Guinness.

Next stop, Kalamazoo and Auntie Lizzie!

Bells Brewery The Eccentric Cafe.  Probably one of Will’s most anticipated stops of the trip.

It’s a baby in a bar…

In case that last one wasn’t obvious enough…


Will’s sampler.

Will and his 2 gals in Kalamazoo.

Kristen is the baby whisperer and keeper of the baby since we left the cafe to check out the store and were informed that if we tried to get back in with the baby, the bouncer chick wouldn’t let us back in.  And we did get booted later.

Accommodations at the lovely “Hotel Weber” so nice and cold….

Will and I spent a lot of time signing as many of the closing papers as we could before the morning when we needed to go to the notary.

day 14 – cliffs of moher

Our last full day in Ireland dawned grey, cloudy, and with quite a bit of rain.  Our only plan for the day was to see the Cliffs of Moher aka the Cliffs of Insanity from Princess Bride.  We’d wanted to attempt something new and take a boat to see the cliffs from a different perspective but unfortunately the weather wholly precluded that plan. 

But we went anyway.  You can’t go to Ireland without seeing the Cliffs. 

Besides they’d completely revamped the place since the last time I’d been there and it was all still under construction the last time my parents had been there so we had to check it out.

Um, it was a little foggy.

 

bundled up against the chill but it wasn’t raining – yet.

Brian’s Tower in the distance.

And it was a little wet.

So that’s when we decided to peruse the visitor’s center (not in existence when I was there), have lunch and hang out.  Will and I finished our postcards.  And miraculously, the weather cleared so Will and I went back out for more pictures.

See that expanse of blank rock – kind of like a platform above – you used to be able to walk right up to the edge and peer over.  You can’t do that anymore.

There are also very strict signs about the end of the path as well.

I got out the telephoto for a few.


We’d left Mom and Dad in the cafe but she came out and was taking a picture of us.  She thought she was being sly but we caught her and took one of her.

 

interesting wood carving
 
We had to get a picture of my dad with this sign since “safe home” is one of his oft used phrases.  
Just one of the many new warning signs.

Will trying to figure out how to get where we’re going.

Cascade falls – there was a cache near here which I believe is why we stopped.

We ended the day back in Shannon to meet up with the cousins for dinner and fly home the next day :(

View Ireland - Day 14 in a larger map

Day 1: Arrival, Adare, Tralee
Day 2: Dingle Peninsula Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Day 3: Kilarney, Muckross House
Day 4: Rock of Cashel
Day 5: Tipperary and Waterford
Day 6: Wexford and Vale of Avoca
Day 7: Dublin Part 1
Day 8: Dublin Part 2
Day 9: Newgrange
Day 10: Mullingar, Belvedere House
Day 11: Aran Islands
Day 12: Kylemore Abbey
Day 13: Galway City, Burren