Tag: family roadtrip

Day 5: Patterns Emerge, Can You Guess Them?

runningwithsuzanne

I feel like this blog writes itself: Wake up in a beautiful place with vacation face. Adventure, on foot or by car until at least one person is hangry. Dissolve all associations with your family in your mind. Find sustenance, or a pick-me-up, or in Lia’s case a root beer float. Make fun of each other and yourself. Have another bonus afternoon adventure. Fall asleep in love with your family and vacation.

We woke up today to another snow shower in Frisco that had even the locals talking, and headed off towards summer weather at our next destination in Durango. Along the way we changed landscapes many times, from the winter beauty still clinging to Copper Mountain, through the mining town of Leadville, past cattle ranches backed by rocky red knolls and distant snow-capped mountains. Bob was clearly enjoying the scenery on this leg of the trip, if not the driving. Was he enjoying the narration from his nerd-kin? One must not speculate. Annie: “That looks just like the Pass of Caradhdras, where Saruman’s fell voice diverted the Fellowship into the Mines of Moria.” Ben: “That looks like a perfect place for a shootout in Red Dead Redemption.” Let’s just say we all needed a reset after 5 hours in the car.

Luckily, breweries provide that… usually. Carver’s Brewery seemed to bring out the worst in us, unfortunately, as we battled for bites of the single order of skillet-cooked cookie topped with salted-caramel ice cream. Yes, my family ganged up on my embarassing cackle-laugh during this show-down (Lia: “Use your inside laugh, mom”), but at least we were able to plot our afternoon plans, and proceed to browse downtown Durango on our way to a nearby hike. At Horse Gulch trails, we were all back in our Colorado mindset.

Lia: “I’m a fan.”
Ben: “I’d live in Colorado.”
Mountain Terrain + Desert Landscape = ???

While the Summit County mountains were new to us for their height and snowy peaks, the kids loved the different scenery on this short hike because it was so different from Asheville. Low sage bushes, rocky ledges, even a few small cacti lined the climbing paths– a good segue stop between the tall-pined mountains we started with and the brown and red desert we head to next. It’s like… a Mesert, right???? (*insert cackle laugh*). My family said, “NO. No. Don’t include that.” But when I commit to cringey blogging I am all the way in.

Tomorrow is a big day though, and I will be on my best behavior. Ben turns 12.

Day 3: Colorahhhhdo

runningwithsuzanne

Today can be summarized in geographic segments: Boulder, Loveland Pass, Silverthorn, and Frisco. Or it can be summarized with the popular cliche’ of mountain towns: “It’s not the altitude, it’s the attitude.” As an Asheville girl and an eternal optimist, I agree with this, and yet… 5-12,000 feet does something to you.

Views from Loveland Pass

We had some good old fashioned good attitudes today, I must admit. But something freaky was going on too. After spending the best part of an hour in a collective trance with the kids at an AHHHmazing puzzle shop on Pearl Street (I want to marry you, Liberty Puzzles!), Ben asked to sit on the promenade and “take in the happy vibe”. I know, right? Between Boulder and the climb through Clear Creek Canyon, Lia was annotating her summer reading book with diligence hoping it might land her a scholarship to the University of Colorado. And even though all my toiletries exploded on me when I opened them, and the whole family had the altitude wobbles atop Loveland Pass, we kept looking around us gleefully saying, “I love it here.”

mesmerized by the tactile art of puzzles in Boulder

Bob’s love for this place was obviously different than our wide-eyed, oxygen-deficient tourist grins. He accommodated Lia’s and my demands to stop on the shoulders of various highways for a photo of the Flat Iron mountains or the rapids of Clear Creek. He was patient as we ambled through the shops in Boulder and Frisco’s quiet village, but his remembrances of old landmarks from his youthful days in Summit County were classic “past-meets-present” kind of magic. The kids would ask, “Tell us about what it was like when you lived here? Was Grandma upset when you left college to come here? Is this you favorite place in the world?” And it led to many awesome conversations about choices, and priorities, and even touched some times on destiny. Like I said, there’s something freaky in the thin air here, and I don’t mean what comes from the dispensaries.

Revisiting his Silverthorn home in the valley of Buffalo and Red

If we flew home tomorrow I would say “what an awesome vacation!” Inside jokes, hotel room dancing, curious map reading, not to mention a good microbrew in the sunny shadow of the Rockies. But this is only Day 3 of this adventure, with more mountain air to help breathe it all in tomorrow.