Mountain cabin vacation 2011 Day 2

These are pictures from Thursday of our cabin vacation. If for no one else we post them here on our personal "online scrapbook" for our family. Written from Beth's perspective.

Since the temperature was 28 when we got done with breakfast, Emily, Daddy, Mother, and Jason played Rummikub while we waited for it to warm up. Daddy was very brave playing games with us, even if he doesn't enjoy it for himself.

Then we all went out to enjoy the beautiful day.

Aspens left of the cabin.

View right of the cabin, looking off the deck.


Hat on (made by a friend, Judy S.) and stick in hand, ready to go on a hike around the property.

We found this tunnel,

and researching it later Daddy believes it was a marmot restroom. They dig a tunnel then fill it little by little from the middle out. Here is the other end of the tunnel a few feet away.

A wonderful picture of my wonderful daddy!

Mother and the "still in the nest" kids!

This is the spot on the cabin property that has [our kind of] cell phone coverage. We "hiked" there a few times to make calls, especially because Grandpa (Janet's dad) had surgery Thursday.



After lunch, Daddy and I decided to drive west [from Lake George] on US Hwy 24 and see what we could see. At first the scenery was woods: pines, aspens, and prairie grass. Then we reached Wilkerson Pass Summit (elevation 9,507), which overlooked a surprising backdrop: a desert valley, with fourteen-ers rising here and there, in appearance like little mounds of dirt surrounded by desolation. You get the idea. (We discovered that all this area we were traveling in, west of Colorado Springs is called "South Park".)
View west: left and down from where we were. The mountain peaks in the distance were a few of many 14,000 feet above sea level.

And just right of that:

View east: Pike's Peak

We drove on down into the valley, through the here-unpictured desert, on and on, through Hartsel, Colo, and then drove right past the entrance to Antero Reservoir. Oops. I didn't know that was our "destination", but thought if I could convince Dad to, we could stop and see water! That's the exact place he was looking for anyway, because our friend Steve (hereafter mentioned) loves to fish there, and we wanted to know what kind of infamous place it was. We finally found the entrance, and made our way in there (a mile or so).

The reservoir itself was beautiful.

With mountain backdrop, and beachy forefront.


Beautiful.

We had to chuckle at this hilarious sign. Click on it to make it big enough to read.

Sometimes things look better in the rear-view mirror ;)
We just had to drive around Hartsel, when we were on our way back to Lake George. Besides touring one of the little stores (looking for some thing we needed), we drove around on the few short, dirt roads in town. Here I am by the school.. the next building over is the library: open on Tuesdays and Thursdays, if I remember correctly.

Arriving back from our 100 mile round-trip excursion we found that Mother, Jason, and Emily had been Kindle-ing,

Computer-ing, read-ing, write-ing, work-ing on the puzzle,

and hike-ing.


Not to worry, I had been having fun crochet-ing while Daddy was drive-ing, and we did get to go explore-ing in South Park!
Thursday evening we had our friends Steve Cunningham and Tonya Sickler up for supper, games, and visiting. Here's Steve playing "Whoonu?"

Tonya when we were playing "Things". The pencil-ed ear means she was guessed-out already.

Several of us playing "Worst Case Scenerio".
I crocheted during part of it.

And Mother worked on the puzzle

which I had done the borders on, then handed over to her.

This is how much of the puzzle was done when we left on Friday (mostly done by Mother).