Oddly, I don’t have much to report this week, so I will keep it short and sweet. Our life has continued with this new-normal. We ate out a few times and had our friends, Julie and Ryan, over for dinner. Generally, we have not been seeing friends, and we have been avoiding big gatherings, but I feel safe with Julie and Ryan, as they are just a two-person household and they work from home. They’re being cautious.

Bigger than Covid this week are the Colorado wildfires. The air quality has been horrendous, but the sunsets have been stunning.

Our community recreation center is nearly finished and the pool is being filled. Due to Covid, we can’t actually use the center, although I think they’re coming up with a plan to open it with a reservation system to keep social distance. I hope we have the chance to use it before it gets cold. The weather has been in the 90’s, but I know that cooler temperatures are just around the corner. I need to start working on those snow shoveling muscles!

A few fun pictures of birthday presents that Dan bought me: A floating flamingo tea infuser and the “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” sign. We didn’t go to Disney World last week, but we did make it to Disney’s Springs for some shopping. Disney’s fans will recognize the quote from the sign! Is the song stuck in your head? Also, we saw similar desk signs (non-Disney themed) in Vail and for essentially the same product/same quality, they were triple the price. I was happily surprised that the Disney item was affordable- especially as it was a gift from my husband! All of this is to say that not everything at Disney is outrageously priced….but everything in Vail is insane!!!

Ending with our cute cat picture of the week: Tom dominating his toy!

This week we continued the celebration of Dan’s birthday with an overnight trip to Colorado Springs, which is just about an hour from our house. Normally, we would’t have spent the night for a place so close, but we had a very early start on Saturday morning for an excursion with Bike Pike’s Peak, so we wanted to stay close to the tour office. The hotel was less than a ten minute drive.

In this post, I’m going to write about our trip in small details, writing a bigger review on the locations in a future post.

We left mid-morning on Friday, enjoying breakfast at The Original Pancake House in Denver, before driving to The Garden of the Gods.

The Garden of the Gods is a major tourist destination and it also happens to be free. Arriving mid-day, which seemed to be the peak of crowds is not advised. We couldn’t find parking, plus it just didn’t seem safe with Covid, so we only drove-through the park. We will have to come back, maybe in the early fall, certainly in the early morning.

Colorado Springs has tons of museums, but many of them are closed due to Covid. The “Ghost Town Wild West Museum” was open! Admittedly, it looked a little suspect as it is located in a strip mall and other signage put “Ghost Town” in quotes, but I love this sort of thing, so we gave it a go.

This place is amazing, again saving for a later review, but a quick note on covid: it’s an indoor museum with a large open space and very high, warehouse style ceilings. There were social distancing notices everywhere and masks were required. They also provided plenty of sanitizer. The best part was we were alone for a majority of our visit. It felt very safe. To drive the safety idea home, they put a mask on their deer statue.

We checked-in to our hotel, Hilton Doubletree in downtown Colorado Springs. Similar to the Hilton in Breckenridge, the hotel was filled with signage regarding masks/social distancing, and hand sanitizer was readily available. Our room did not have the sticker seal to show it had been cleaned, but it looked immaculate, and things like the tv remote had a sleeve to show it had been cleaned. The pool was open and we were able to use it after reserving a slot. The pool is indoors and they allowed a max of fifteen guests in the pool area. We were able to reserve it for an unpopular time and we had it completely to ourselves. It was great! The first swim of 2020!

For lunch, we walked to the nearby Phantom Canyon Brewery, where we were seated on their outdoor patio and the menu was touchless. We’ve seen the touchless menus at a few restaurants and I think it’s a great solution. Other restaurants have disposable menus, which seems like a waste.

For dinner, we had an absolutely amazing experience at Mood Tapas Bar. We were severely under-dressed, but fully welcomed by the staff. We ended up ordering a nine-course tasting menu with wine, that was created by Chef Curry. It was one of the best meals we have ever eaten! Chef Curry personally brought out our dessert and he couldn’t have been more humble. He’s only twenty-four, but he is destined to be a name in the culinary world. He also sent a very kind personal email in response to my Yelp review.

Downtown Colorado Springs is a cute area, with plenty of stores and restaurants. Unfortunately, there were also signs of Covid’s damage.

The next morning, we woke up at 5am for Dan’s big birthday present, a bike tour down the tallest mountain in Colorado: Pike’s Peak! The tour company, Bike Pike’s Peak, was great about Covid-safety, although I can’t help thinking that this was one of the riskiest things we have done in this new normal.

Masks were required, but we did get in a shuttle van with six other people. We also didn’t have sanitizer as we were biking. The bike ride itself was extremely thrilling, really pushing my comfort zone, but I would definitely do it again!

Our experience included lunch and we felt funny not sitting with a guy from our tour that was solo, so we joined him. This was risky, as we had to remove our masks to eat and we were in close proximity. Who knows how this stranger has been handling social distancing? I’m not sure if others feel the same way, but we have had some experiences where the norms of social politeness have prompted me to be a little risky. It hasn’t been anything really bad, but small risks or moments where I don’t know how to navigate politeness with this new normal.

On Sunday, we found out that our friends, Roger and Katrin, whom we haven’t seen in about four years, were driving through Denver on their move from Minnesota to Los Angeles. We couldn’t miss seeing them, so with other mutual friends (Julie and Ryan), we ate dinner at The Lazy Dog Cafe. Roger and Katrin have a very cute elderly beagle named Billy, and we all sat on the patio. Again though, we were in close proximity and we gave hugs.

It wasn’t enough catching-up, so we had the whole group over to our house for dinner the following evening.

Roger, Katrin, and Julie immigrated to the US from Germany, so I was proud to bring out the colored crystal glasses that my mom brought back from Germany in 1961. My father was in the military and my parents lived in Germany for two years. My mom was evacuated with other military families, when the Berlin Wall went up, and she carried these crystal glasses on her lap during the plane ride. She also hauled them around Tivoli Gardens, during a lay-over trip in Denmark. To me, they are holiday glasses, and when I look at them, I can taste my mom’s turkey dinner with her stuffing.

This was a busy week, but we did have time to start a fabulous, if not highly uncomfortable, television series: “Love Life” starring Anna Kendrick. We are three episodes in, and every episode has made us cringe, but we are blown away by the excellent writing and Kendrick’s performance. It’s on HBO Max and totally worth it. We also discovered that HBO Max carries our favorite cheesy show that we always watch in hotels, “Impractical Jokers.” So we are now working our way through the series to discover episodes we missed. It’s great to watch without commercials. It seems bizarre that this show was acquired by HBO. The brands are not compatible.

And my usual ending with cute cat pictures. Slinky is in a bed that Julie and Ryan gave to the cats and he’s owning it! My favorite picture is Tom listening attentively as Dan plays the ukulele. This time last year, we were heading home from our magical Hawaiian vacation. I hope we will return in 2021.