We got back Tuesday evening from a wonderful weekend in the Colorado mountains! Val and Steve rent a place in Vail twice a year and invited us out to stay with them. I’m so grateful we have these amazing friends who want to share their favorite place with us, and even more grateful we can be 100% ourselves around them, and they can do the same with us. The older I get, the more important to me it is to spend my free time with people like that.

We got to Denver Friday night and spent the night at their place, then headed out to Vail early Saturday morning. Val and Steve were telling us traffic is super hit or miss on the way to Vail. It’s supposed to be a two hour drive but sometimes takes four hours. Ick! So we headed out early and decided to check in halfway and see if we wanted to stop in Breckenridge, either because we needed a break from the long drive or just for funsies.

Luckily traffic was flowing just fine!

Seeing the mountains never gets old

And we decided to stop in Breckenridge and check out Country Boy Mine. Steven is super into all those gold shows on Max and we hadn’t done any panning since we were in Alaska in 2016.

We skipped the mine tour ($$) and just paid for panning. We got a quick lesson, practiced a bit, then headed out to the pond to pan. We didn’t find anything but fool’s gold and other random pretty worthless stuff, but it was fun!

Ha, typing this, I’m remembering my head kept pounding every time I bent over to pan. I always seem to get a headache the day after I arrive in Denver. I tried to pregame with lots of water and Tylenol but I still got it. Luckily it was gone the next day.

It was so beautiful at the mine. I love love love that dry mountain air and being in the sun with temps in the 70s and not having sweat run down my back. Chef’s kiss. Amazing.

After panning we got lunch at Amazing Grace (nothing notable, we didn’t have any great food on this trip, including a super weird floral chai here), then walked around Breckenridge, checking out shops. It was my first time there (we’d only ever been to Keystone) and I wondered how it would compare to Vail. Val told me she likes Breckenridge but prefers Vail (obviously); that Breckenridge is much more spread out and not as walkable as Vail. I agree – it felt that way to me too. Vail feels more quaint and charming, probably because it’s snuggled up right against the mountain and has that swiss alp ski village vibe going on. Breckenridge felt commercial and the shops were mostly high end stuff.

On the way out of town we swung by Isak Heartstone – a giant troll made out of recycled materials by Danish artist Thomas Dambo. I’ve seen photos of these trolls but never one in person and it was so freaking cool! It makes me want to go see the ones at the Arboretum here (here is a map of where these trolls are across the world, and you can see all of his works here – cool stuff!).

After our troll sighting we drove to Vail, unpacked, hung out, made dinner, hit up the hot tub, and called it a night!