A few highlights from the weekend!

Tuesday

• Meeting Valerie! Valerie is one of my Instagram rock painting friends. I told her I was coming to town and wanted to meet up so we got together to hike.
• Riding in Valerie’s Jeep Wrangler (with Renegade trim). I drool over these every time I see one, and was super pumped when she showed up in it.
• Hiking Eldorado Canyon State Park. The views were amazing and it was so great to have so much time to chat. I wonder if people who live there ever get sick of the views?
• Filming some Reels together.
• Getting lunch, going to a running store, then getting ice cream with Valerie. Tuesday was the day Steven had stuff going on for work so Valerie and I had a lot of time to hang out! It was fantastic. We’re planning to see each other next year for a rock painting retreat. I can’t wait!
• Edited to add – Valerie gave me this amazing 15 days of cat socks advent calendar! It’s been a lot of fun opening them.

• Driving to Rocky Mountain National Park with Steven. Whoa. It was so much colder up there (duh) but the views were absolutely amazing.
• Seeing the hotel from The Shining.
• Seeing some beautiful holiday lights in a city park.
• Getting all the Colorado postcards filled out.
• Making some Reels from our trip.
• One last time in the hot tub (lowlight – it must not have been hot enough – I immediately started shivering when I got out of it and had to take the longest hottest shower to warm up).

Wednesday

• Cute photos from our cat sitter.
• Visiting Cheyenne, Wyoming. When we saw how close it was and that it would only add 45 minutes to the trip, we had to stop! We went to the state capitol building, the state museum (which was really interesting but we were short on time), walked around a bit, and got a Wyoming Starbucks mug. Everyone was so friendly. I’m so glad we could stop – neither of us had been to Wyoming before.
• Hiding my friends’ and my rocks in Cheyenne.
• Carl’s Jr for lunch. Hands down the best service we had the whole trip. Not saying anyone was BAD but this person went above and beyond!
• Seeing some of the painted boots in Cheyenne. They have 25 painted boots around the city! We saw 6 of them.
• Arriving at the hotel. Ha. Notice I left out the seven hours in between. It was fine but we were kind of over being in the car that day! Thankfully, it was another day with great weather (for December).
• Eating a very later dinner in the hotel bar. The hotel had such a great vibe and the food was great (hummus platter and glazed brussels sprouts). Unfortunately, there was loud live music. Ha. Ha ha ha.

Thursday

• Another run in Lincoln. I ran on a trail in town then saw more of the university.
• Trying some vegan pastries on the way out of town. They had a vegan donut, cinnamon roll, and peanut butter pastry.
• Visiting the Holy Family Shrine. What a beautiful building! We saw from the highway driving into Nebraska, and I’m glad we could stop during its open hours.
• My nephews already getting their Nebraska postcards (I mailed one from Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming).
• Arriving home after another long day of driving and seeing the KITTIES (and a huge stack of mail, ahhh).
• Unpacking and getting laundry going.

Lowlights

• Crazy passing. In Colorado we saw some very dangerous passing on two lane (one each direction) roads.
• Driving in the dark curvy mountain roads. Well, Steven drove, but he told me it was stressful. Especially with people riding our a$$. We pulled over when we could to let people pass.
• The food not being that great. Ha. This was not meant to be a culinary trip, but everything was pretty mediocre. Again, we were grateful to have so many options! Just kind of surprising they were meh.
• Getting home and having Apollo be noticeably skinnier and Ned noticeably fatter from Ned eating all their afternoon dry food because the trio (that is what our sitter calls Khali, Starbuck, and Apollo) refusing to come down in the afternoon to eat with Ned out.
• How many times the wind knocked my phone on my tiny tripod over on this trip. I am really lucky the phone screen never cracked. In a lot of my photos (not published here, but I have them) you can see me running off to catch my phone.
• That thing in my neck getting so swollen. Hmm. Did I even talk about this? I saw my doctor about this weird protrusion in my neck in the spring (my medical records just call it “lump on neck”). She said it was fine and the only reason to do something about it would be if it hurts or got bigger. It got really swollen on this trip – maybe from the elevation and me being dehydrated? If it does not go down I am going to make an appointment.