Boulder Hiking

As we're always looking for a new hike, it seemed like Boulder, CO was the perfect spot.  Our friend Seth and his dog Rocky decided to join us for a hike to the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain.

 

You can't stop Trish from hiking to the top of a mountain.

 

This hike provided us great views of Rocky Mountain National Park and it's highest peak, Long's Peak.  It stands at just over 14,000 feet.

It certainly is nice to have a photographer along on the hike with us (thanks Seth).

 

Rocky Mountain National Park

Now that we're down to our typical three day work week, we were able to get out for a hike in the national park today. (turns out there isn't a lot of free time when you work five days a week!)

 We hiked to a place called Gem Lake.  It should have been called Gem Pond, or better yet....Gem Puddle.  It was only about 0.2 acres, which hardly qualifies as a lake.

....Still, it was such a beautiful sunny day, we didn't care where we hiked to.

 

This is what outhouses look like on the edge of a cliff.  I suppose the top half of the structure has already fallen down the hill.

 

Traveling is still fun.  Enjoying beautiful creation with each other is the best part.

First Week Down

We're traveling in Colorado with a company called Banner Health.  At Banner you must complete almost two weeks of new employee orientation before they let you start your job.  We're done with the orientation and just completed the first week of real work.  We celebrated by going to Cracker Barrel this morning.  So exciting!

Romney/Ryan 2012

We normally don't like to spread political propaganda on our blog, but while we were in Colorado Springs today, so was Mitt Romney.

Tickets were free, so we figured "why not?"

In 2007, my friend Brad and I found out that Mitt Romney was going to be in East Grand Rapids for a campaign stop while he was running in the republican primary.  There were about 100 people there that time, he didn't even need a microphone.  This time.....it was a bit different.  Try 5,000 people inside an airplane hangar.  In 2007 we got to shake his hand.... more than once!  Today we got picked to sit in the bleachers, no hand shake.

He also didn't arrive in this last time I saw him.

Garden of the gods

While visiting Colorado Springs today, we were able to visit the "Garden of the gods."

You might think, "these pictures look familiar."

We thought it "looked familiar" too.  We thought it looked just like Sedona, AZ.  Only, it was smaller.