The main difference between our two week vacation and the rest of our trip is that this bit doesn’t involve working. Or not too much anyway. The rest of it is kind of the same… hiking, biking, paddling, camping, eating and drinking. Only now we get to spend all day doing it 🙂

Overall, very impressed with Colorado. Some of the highlights from our hols:

Rocky Mountain National Park

Hiking in RMNP was a high alpine treat, complete with a rather close encounter with a fat furry marmot (not quite a bear or a moose but I’ll take it). This was also our first real taste of snow. Hence the only entry to make it into the highlights AND the not-so highlights.

Crested Butte

Cute little tiny town, they closed down part of their Main Street recently to allow for additional outdoor restaurant seating. Can recommend the Secret Stash pizza and also a place that does pasties, nom nom. Great hiking and bike riding right from town.

Plus one of the most amazing hikes we’ve done this year along nearby Scarp Ridge. I love the 360 views you get from a ridge hike and this one didn’t disappoint.

Ooh and Darren did a rather adventurous paddle down the Slate River at Crested Butte. Think shallow water. And rapidly moving water. And rocks. All of the above. Therefore also involved a bit of kneel down paddle boarding.

Ouray

Blasted through this town for an afternoon. Just time enough for a taste of the ‘Perimeter hike’. This trail skirts the mountains around the town, the entire time with a view down to the town encapsulated within a mountain amphitheater. Just gorgeous.

Telluride

Most other hikes we’ve done involved a 2 mile hike up through the forest to get to the more open exposed section (which is the bit where you start to get the views). Telluride has a gondola which gets you above all that. Not only that but a FREE gondola (the only one of its kind in the US). And from then on, views galore. And then there’s the wildflowers, OMG the wildflowers! I’m loving the wildflowers. Absolutely the best hiking so far.

And according to Darren, some pretty good mountain biking too.

Basecamp time

So happy that we have our home away from home. It’s so damn cosy for those chilly nights and there’s nothing like beers around the campfire after a hard day’s recreating! Rustled up a few nice meals along the way too, even if I do say so myself.

Harvest Hosts

Ah, gotta love the ability to stay at non-campground places that are happy for you to park at overnight with our annual HH membership. Our first on this trip was Mountain View Winery near Olathe, CO. So this wine region is no Napa Valley but what they lack in refinement, they make up for in rural charm. Not to mention the company of the four-footed residents. Old Seamus the 15 year old mongrel lab who may not be long for this world, a sausage dog with small dog issues, and Tiddlywinks the exuberant wolfhound, who didn’t think twice about bounding over the table where your wine is placed. A few near misses there.

Another Harvest Host was Stoneyard Distillery, Dotsoro, CO, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. They’ve got a good thing going as they have ample parking and allow up to four RVs (whereas most others only allow one). They distill from beet sugar, their concoctions quite unusual, and in addition to working our way through a tasting of shots, the proprietor was more than happy to rustle up a few cocktails.

Their most unusual spirit was still in the making. A jam jar of intriguing layered contents sat by the bar, with cacao nibs settled on the bottom, cocoa butter above and topped with a light coffee colored liquid. Turns out this is going to be a cacao spirit fit to blow your head off, with high intensity cacao flavor emulsified into their 176 Proof spirit. A whopping 88% ABV. Yes you read that right. We were treated to a preview taster by way of a pipette!

We arrived in Frisco a week before our vacation was due to start – we weren’t here for a holiday, we were here to work. Ah well, maybe a bit of both, there’s time each day before and after work of course. And Colorado is on Mountain Time, an hour ahead of our usual Pacific Time. Which means we’ve got oodles of time in the morning to have fun in the wilderness, before the work day has even begun. Likewise, it means the evenings are somewhat short. But that just means we need to drink faster 🙂

Frisco is a cute little town nestled in the mountains, centered around a lake (actually a reservoir). The campsite is a couple of miles out of town, a picturesque little spot by the lake, with a bike path into town. As Annie said to Daddy Warbucks “I think I’m gonna like it here!”

So. The morning’s activities (before work I would remind you) consisted of trail running, mountain biking, paddle boarding and hiking. Not all on the same day. But we fitted in what we could.

For a couple of days, Darren even chose the SUP as his mode of transport for commuting to work via the lake.

Evening activities as I mentioned were time limited. But we still managed to fit in a little trip up to the nearby ski town of Breckenridge (they have a brewery AND a distillery!).

It was around this time we thought a fun addition to our trip would be a drone. Fun to learn to fly and hopefully get some interesting photos and videos of our trip. Within two days, a Mavic Mini was delivered to the co-working space. Hence an evening of practicing take-off, flying and landing (lesson number one: do not land in long grass with the propellor blades acting as a multi-purpose strimmer. It messes up your new drone and quite honestly, a lawnmower does a better job.)

None of this would be possible if we weren’t able to work along the way. So the EVO3 co-working space bookmarking both ends of our Colorado vacation was uber-important. Having been office-based for over 15 years, this remote working was new to me. And in this COVID-19 era, neither of us really knew what to expect. But we had WiFi. Tick. There was an individual desk for each of us, screened off from anyone else. There were masks. There was very blatant cleaning going on, and often. Anti-bacterial wipes and sanitizing gel in abundance. And it was next door to a coffee shop that excelled in afogato, a shot of espresso poured over their home made espresso chip gelato ice cream. Good job we were playing hard as well as working hard.

Ah and I cheated and had a bit more time off than Darren. Packed it in with a pootle round Dillon Dam on the bike path. And an awesome morning’s hike up Mount Royal, right from town, up a big mountain, views back down into town, sweet.

And then get this… I was able to get an appointment for a cut and blow dry at a nearby salon. Five months of hair growing longer and lankier, it felt sooo good! Both me and the hairdresser wore masks, which was the weirdest thing ever. But I’ll take it. The New Me. Ready for vacation. 🙂