Colorado!!! Part 1

Well, in the spirit of our great Grand Canyon adventure last year, we decided to load everybody up and drive out to Colorado to see our friends the Kemmerlins and have some new adventures!

The trip had an ominous start to it as AK threw up about 30 minutes into the trip. Being the non-complainer that she is, she looked up from her puke and assured us, "I'm okay!" Praise the Lord, she never got sick again and apparently was just having an episode of carsickness rather than something contagious.

Once again we opted to drive through the night and let the kids sleep while we got a lot of mileage under our belt. Here is St. Louis at 3:00 AM.

After about 25 straight hours of driving, we got to Denver!

Here we are at Union Station...

We stayed in Denver Saturday night thanks to an amazing deal procured by Spencer's cousin Brittany, who works at a hotel in Denver. The hotel was amazing and definitely the nicest place we've ever stayed - so nice, in fact, that they didn't even have microwaves in our room, so instead of heating up our chili for supper we got to explore downtown Denver and have some local pizza (which was probably preferred by at least 80% of us.)

After a wonderful night of sleep in a bed instead of a minivan, we left the city and headed toward the Springs. On the way we stopped at Red Rock Canyon.

We explored for about 8 minutes before the bottom dropped out of the sky and the rain came pouring down.

We left Red Rock and headed toward Colorado Springs. On the way we were looking for somewhere to pull off and heat up our lonely and neglected chili for lunch, but it was so rainy and cold - so cold, in fact, that we soon began to spot piles of snow on the ground. We finally found a park with a picnic shelter, but the wind kept blowing out our propane stove and the kids were all shivering, so finally we made the call to move our little party inside the heated bathroom across the field. We ate in the warmth of the restroom, which was both weird and stressful for me (though not apparently for anyone else), and shared our hot meal with the homeless guy taking up residence in the bathroom next door. It was an entirely strange and perfect way for Spencer and me to spend our 12th wedding anniversary - not at all what I would have imagined doing 12 years ago, but 12 years later, I couldn't imagine it any other way.