This past weekend was a lot of fun. It was my year anniversary with Collin and we decided to do something different. I even got pictures but since I'm at work until Wednesday morning, you'll have to wait for those. But trust me, they'll be worth the wait!

Until then, here are the details:

Friday morning we headed out to Nederland which is a few miles outside of Boulder. There's supposed to be a recording studio there called Caribou Ranch where acts like John Lennon, The Rolling Stones, Elton John and BADFINGER recorded. If you're a regular reader, you now know why I wanted to go there. I wanted to be in the same place that Pete Ham was... I wanted to stand in front of the studio with my Wish You Were Here album (the one recorded at Caribou Ranch) and smile like a loon.

We got up to Nederland after a scenic tour through Boulder, a town I hadn't been to since I was very small and my Uncle Ray was going to college there. It's a very pretty town and one that I was excited to see... I've read all of Stephen White's books & they're set in Boulder so it was nice to see what he's been writing about first hand after all these books! When we passed the Justice Center, I actually got all excited and pointed it out to Collin: "There's where Lauren works!!" Lauren is the hero's wife. I'm pathetic and I read too much, I know!!

So! We had our MapQuest directions all printed out on how to get to Caribou. It said we would have to go on some partially unpaved roads. Guess what? They were ALL unpaved once we got off the main road. And we were in the middle of nowhere. All we could think of was the movie Wrong Turn!! And then, of course, rolling through my brain was "You got purty lips, boy." Thank God we found the main highway again. We circled back to town and stopped at the Town Hall to ask directions. When the lady heard what we were looking for, she said, "Oh! That burned down in '85." Uh! You could practically hear my hopes shattering on the floor. Why hadn't I heard about that??

She thought that the studio might have been rebuilt and was on public land. She told us how to get there and it turned out it was easy to find - it was just on open spaces land that was CLOSED until June 30th! AAARRRGGGHHH!!! All my hopes, dashed!

So we decided to go up to Estes Park.

I've lived in Colorado all my life and had never been in that part of the state. There's some gorgeous scenery & a beautiful church called the St. Malo Center which we got some pictures of - you'll get to see them hopefully Thursday! Estes Park was pretty. I liked it a lot. We ended up driving around until we found The Stanley Hotel, the place used for the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King's The Shining. It was sooooo cool. Collin got lots of swell shots of it. We were in the gift shop and missed out on the tour that was just starting so we contented ourselves with wandering the first floor (the upstairs was for guests only.) and we decided to have lunch at The Cascades, a very posh restaurant in the hotel. I had a bison burger. It was delish!

The ride home was nice - we stopped at Becker Reservoir and got some nice scenery shots and we also pulled over and got some pretty cool raging river pictures. Am I building the pics up enough that by Thursday you'll be waiting in breathless anticipation?? I hope so!!

All in all - a great day! Capped off by Derek's amazing comeback win at softball!!

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