First 2 days in Vail

I hope no one gets sick of reading vacation recaps, because that is just about all that I have to talk about right now, so I'm drawing this out...

...We finally arrived in Vail on Sunday afternoon and immediately hit up the Vail farmer's market.

It was such a cool farmer's market!  Not only was there a lot of good food, but there were tons of artists with booth's set up.  There was SO much to look at!  We also went into a few stores and I bought the hat I'm wearing below, I love it- I just need to learn to wear hats more often.

It started to rain while we were walking around, so we took shelter at a Mexican restaurant and ordered a pitcher of margaritas, naturally.  That night we were still pretty tired from the drive, so we picked up some pizzas and hung out at the condo.  We stayed at the Arrowhead resort at the Country Club of the Rockies and it was SO nice!  I'm sure buying a place there is ridiculously expensive, but it has been added to the bucket list for sure.

The next morning we were up for a short and pretty run near this creek.  Running at high altitude sucks, but the scenery helps a lot!

Later that morning, we took the gondola up Vail mountain and started the hike around up there, eventually working our way back down to the base.  Hiking downhill is awesome, but it does not do awesome things to your calf muscles, ouch!  

Tree pose, obvs.  And my dad's tree pose with his walking sticks. 

As if our day hadn't already been active enough, we went golfing that afternoon.  We played Sonnenalp, which was gorgeous!!  It was also a course that much better suited my ability than the course we usually play at home too, so it was really fun.  

I hit some really good shots, and one of my drives actually landed a few feet from the hole, which NEVER happens to me.  Of course, I had to celebrate with an aperol spritz!

After golf, we went to another Mexican restaurant.  It's just a little hole in the wall in Edwards, but it's one of my dad's favorite places to eat.  There may have been another pitcher of margaritas.  That's all I'm going to say about that.

Boulder and Red Rocks

Mark and I were still on the road to vail on Sunday and had planned to drive through Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park on the way, but we decided that we'd rather get to  Vail earlier to catch the farmer's market.  So we drove through Boulder instead and looked around the University of Colorado campus a bit.

It was a pretty neat campus, I can definitely see why so many people I know have gone there (including my dad for 1 year before deciding it was "too fun").  My aunt and uncle used to live in Boulder, but I haven't been there for quite some time, so it was fun to see the town again.

We continued on our drive through Denver and stopped at Red Rocks to look around for about an hour.  It was gorgeous!  I would love to see a concert here someday, what a cool place!

There were SO MANY people working out there!  I didn't realize that it is basically like a huge outdoor gym for the locals.  As you can see, there was also a yoga class going on, so cool!

Obviously, I had to do some yoga of my own here!

After leaving Red Rocks, we continued on our way and finally made it to Vail!  Stay tuned :)

Our night in Fort Collins

Hello again!  We are back from our week in Vail and I am missing the mountains so much already!   We had a great time and I have so much to share, so I am just starting with our drive out and our night in Fort Collins.

We left on Friday afternoon for Omaha, where we spent the night after dropping Shay off with Mark's parents.  Definitely not the most exciting drive to make, but leaving for a road trip is always so much fun! Here is Omaha looking pretty as we rolled into town:

  

We could have definitely gotten further that night, but my legs were really sore from my run that morning.  Plus, Mark used to live in Omaha and wanted to take me to one of his old hangout spots.

We were on the road early the next morning and headed for Fort Collins.  We got in pretty early in the afternoon and had plenty of time to check out a few breweries.  We started with O'Dell which has a really laid-back tasting room with plenty of cool things to look at, good beer too!

After O'Dells we headed to New Belgium for the tour we had signed up for.  It was a 90 minute tour, which I thought seemed long, but it was one of the best brewery tours I've ever been on.  It was definitely more of a "production" than O'Dell, but really informative and down to earth.  We bought a growler of one of our favorites that we tasted, the Yuzu Berlinerweisse.  It was really yummy and I've never seen it around MN.  If you see it, tell me and then buy it!

We ended the night at Ft. Collins Brewery.  This was the perfect end to our day because in addition to their tasting room, they also serve food there.  We had a really good dinner and one of our favorite beers, Red Banshee.  We discovered this beer on our last trip to CO, and had been looking forward to having it again for a long time!

Fort Collins has lots of other breweries that we would have loved to check out, but these 3 are all in a row and are super convenient to visit all at once.  

After all that beer drinking, we were pretty worn out.  We hit the hay early and were up with the sun the next morning to finish the drive to Vail.

More to come later...