Our trip to the San Juan mountains was breathtakingly beautiful, exhausting, exhilarating, heartbreaking, refreshing… You know how it feels after you’ve done something really hard– so good to be done? That’s where I am right now. It may take me a few days to write about the whole thing after I dig out from under this pile of laundry.
See ya here soon. It’s too big of a story not to tell.
We’ve been back for a week and I’m finally feeling like I can wrap my brain around a blog post attempt. We had fun. Wanna see?
We got to Boise in time for Barry to race in the annual Twilight Criterium in downtown Boise.
See him up there in the lead? He wasn’t quite in that position at the very end, but he did really well and had a lot of fun in that mass of riders on slick skinny tires riding in circles in 102 degree weather. It was fun for me to watch while I cast on for my vacation knitting project and visited with old friends from high school/ college.
Boise is a cool town. Every time I’m there I wish I lived there.
Anyway, we got there and slept on the floor in my parents house for a couple of nights, then headed up to the mountains.
My sister in-law’s family has a big “cabin” on lots of land with a river running through it and a natural hot spring pool. That’s where we headed and set up camp. I put the word cabin in parentheses because it has 9 bedrooms, each with it’s own bathroom, a big screen TV and an enormous kitchen. It was a such a fun, comfortable place for all 22 (give or take, depending on the day) of us to stay.
The kids rode bikes and played horse shoes with their cousins.
They caught butterflies and they swam.
This is Ian’s first ever jump of a diving board. Isn’t that too cute that he covered his eyes? I love that kid.
They dug in the sand. We all swam in the river.
The grandparents watched and my dad said it was impossible to take a good picture of him because his eyes are so squinty. I have those squinty eyes too. And I got a good picture.
We watched my dad slam dunk a basketball. Definitely one of the highlights of the entire trip!
My nephew had a Halloween birthday party while we were there, for which we forgot costumes. I’m kicking myself that I can’t find a picture of Logan in the hunting outfit he scrounged out of a closet in the cabin, but the impromptu mummy costumes and Captain Garbage Can weren’t too bad either. The mummies didn’t fare too well during the water balloon games, as you might imagine.
The “Squishy Islands” in the middle of the river were the favorite place for the kids to play. My sister in-law would have freaked out had she seen the mud bath extravaganza. The river rinsed it all off in a jiffy though.
And of course, Barry rode his bike to the top of a mountain. Beautiful, isn’t it?
You want to see a few more pictures, don’t you? Okay, just a few more…
Aahhh… I love my family.
Hunter likes cows lately. Just about everything bigger than a dog that stands on four legs is a cow to him. As soon as he gets a glimpse of one he moos and moos and says cow with his lips sticking out. He really is the cutest thing that ever lived.
Since he hasn’t seen a cow close up ever before I decided today was the day he needed to have that experience. There is a great park in Englewood (which is part of Denver) called Belleview Park that has a little petting farm. Brenna and Logan took turns manning the camera because I was on baby patrol.
Hunter was pretty hesitant about being close to the animals. He said cow over and over and mooed when the little calves they had were on the other side of the farm area from us or closed in a pen, but they were just too big for him up close. He was wild about the chickens, though, and didn’t mind the goats and sheep. He thought the pig was hilarious and laughed and laughed and tried to imitate the pig’s grunts and snorts.
The one who really had a good time was Ian. He fell in love with this sheep and petted it there for about 10 minutes. He didn’t mind when the white rooster tried to eat Buzz off of his shoe,
and he found a good friend in the bristly pig.
My animal loving Brenna had a good time too, and as we left she said, “I think maybe this is what I want to do when I grow up, I mean, those girls get are getting paid to take care of the animals.” I guess being farm girls is just in our blood. Animals just make life feel so– real, I guess. I’ve never actually lived on a farm, but my mom grew up on one and when I was a little girl we visited my grandparents in the home where she grew up almost weekly. I was always too self conscious to really say what I wanted or ask to help with the horses and be really involved in the workings of the place, but I would sit out in the yard and daydream about growing up and somehow inheriting that beautiful, perfect little place with its enormous sycamore trees and clothes line and peonies and berry patch and green pastures. I really thought it was the most beautiful place on earth. I had my wedding reception there. Then the housing developments encroached on it and my grandparents had to sell it. They moved farther away from town on lots of open land. They made it beautiful, built stables and planted berries. 2 years ago now my grandpa passed away. I remember a conversation I had with my grandma about selling that big place and moving into town closer to my mom so she wasn’t just out there all alone. She said she’d like to, that she needed to, but that everything made her feel claustrophobic with their fences and little yards. She said she was born a country girl and maybe she just needed the open spaces.
After that conversation I’ve wondered if maybe I was born a country girl too– if I have that yearning to live with space and trees and animals because my grandma passed it down to me– if it’s just in my blood…
Our weekend was rather rainy. Actually it has just been rainy here lately. Every afternoon the thunderclouds roll in from the mountains. Where we live, kind of up on a hill 20 miles east of the mountains, we can watch the storms as they move over the city toward us. Sunday brought torrential downpours. Barry is such a good dad– he’s not one to let a little a lot of rain throw a wrench in our plans.
Our little homegrown fireworks show looked like this:
(That’s our new (to us) camper over to the left of the picture set up in front of our house to “dry out” from our camping trip. The whole drying out thing took a couple of days because as soon as it dried out it rained again.)
He’s even brave, or crazy, enough to hunch over on really skinny tires and ride really fast with a bunch of other guys on skinny tires going really fast on wet slippery pavement.
The rest of us were crazy enough to go watch him.
