Estes Park, CO

For Christmas one of the pastors at Wellspring (I think he would be considered the pastoral care pastor - or some such title) gave each of the elders a groupon for a 2 night stay at a lodge in Estes Park.  Chris' aunt and uncle were kind enough to keep Elianna for the 3 days 2 night stint which basically means Elianna got to play all day with 2 people as her captive audience.  Aunt Bobbi says she got her nails done and her hair done multiple times during the day.  Elianna loves it!

After dropping Elianna off, Chris and I headed to dinner at Smokin' Daves BBQ in Lyons CO which is right outside of Estes Park.  It was then super nice to get to our lodge and do absolutely nothing!  It's nice to do every once in a while!  After sleeping in (unheard of!) Wednesday morning, we ate breakfast and headed out to Rocky Mountain National Park to snowshoe (Nathan and Kim, you would be so proud of us!).  We actually snowshoed for the next 3 hours covering over 3 miles most of which we decided to blaze our own trails and some of which was up the side of the mountain.  It was a great great time but my legs were super duper tired!  A definite activity we will do again.

White rabbit

Snow packed trail

Huge tracks

Chris out on the ice in the middle of the lake

There is also a video of him sliding on the lake.  I have to figure out how to get it on here - Elianna loves to watch it!

Part of our groupon deal was a gift certificate for $ off at a local restaurant - the Wapiti.  I have no idea how exactly it is said, but it's fun to try to say it.  We had some phenomenal loaded potatoes!  There is one place in NJ that we always enjoy getting loaded fries or potatoes from.  These loaded potatoes sure did give them a run for their money!  Delicious!  After dinner we met up with the teaching pastor from our church who brought his family up on the same groupon present.  I'm not sure how Chris was able to swim and horse around with the kids after our excursion that morning.  I opted to sit out and visit.

Thursday morning we decided we would get up early and climb Old Man Mountain.  For those of you who don't know (and for those of you who do know - stop laughing!), I am scared to death of heights!  Extremely scared to death!  Keep that in mind.  Our alarm went off at 5:30 am and we hiked over to the mountain.  Let me back up to the night before - Chris talked to one of the guys at the front desk of the lodge who told him how to get to Old Man Mountain and then he said sunrise was around 6am.  We thought that was weird because the sun doesn't come up for us until around 7am but what did we know?  We don't live there.  Fast forward back to our early morning.  Of course, when we got to the mountain, it was still dark.  We waited a bit but after feeling a bit creepy just sitting there in the dark (the starting place was in a neighborhood), we decided to climb up a bit.  And then a little bit more.  And then...  Until I couldn't handle it anymore.  The dark threw me off and freaked me out.  Being the chicken great wife that I am, I opted to sit on a rock and wait for Chris to climb to the top.  Didn't want him to miss out on the fun.  So off he went.  And off I went to sit on a rock.

Did I mention that I did not take my phone with me?  As I sat on a rock, the wind began to pick up and since I dressed to climb and not to sit on a rock, I grew colder and colder.  (Did the formalness of that sentence help you feel sorry for me?)  And I had no phone to keep track of the time.  Did I mention it got colder and colder?  Thankfully, there was a little place to sit between two rocks to help ward off some of the wind.  However those two rocks did nothing to help my wandering mind of my Chris falling and not getting up and my having no idea.  My only positive thought was that he had water and banana chips in his backpack.  After beginning to hyperventilate, I decided to climb down (which in my crazy mind was way scarier than going up) and run the 0.7 miles back to our lodge.  Go to the breakfast room and ask the guy to let me into my room so that I could get my cell phone and call Chris to make sure he wasn't stuck somewhere with only water and banana chips to live on.

While the guy in the breakfast room searched everywhere for his keys (I found them on the counter), Chris climbed down from the mountain only to find that I was gone.  But I didn't know he was looking for me because I was going to my room to get my phone to call him.  Whew!  This story is getting long.... Anyway, by the time I got to my phone, Chris had called twice.  When I called him back he was now running the 0.7 miles back to our lodge.  Needless to say it was one of those reunion things where the couple are running towards each other and giving each other hugs while telling the other one how much they love them and that they are glad they didn't have to eat banana chips alone somewhere on the mountain.

Apparently what I thought was the top of the mountain was no where near the top.  It was probably a fourth of the way to the top of the mountain.  Yes that means I probably made it less than an eighth up the mountain.

Picture from EnjoyEstesPark.com

Just wanted to show you how big the mountain is that he climbed

The view Chris had from the top of the mountain

That was pretty much how we ended our Estes Park trip.  We packed up, checked out, ate lunch, picked up Elianna, hung out with Aunt Bobbi and Uncle Royce and then headed home.  Whew!  It was a great time and are so thankful to Jim and Angela for their awesome gift!

Deer outside of our lodge - there ended up being about 8-10