Part Deux

Well, we climbed Quandary and had a great time. Turbo is like a mountain goat. He leaped from rock to rock, would get about 10 feet ahead of us and stop and wait for us. He especially liked getting admired by all of the tourists and rubbing in the snow at the summit. He rolled around and slid all around the snow like it was his long lost friend. It took the three of us just under 3 hours to hike up the mountain at a pretty leisurely pace. Chris and I were both surprised to see that it took nearly as long to get back down. It was a great overall climb and we were happy with our new poles and bag purchases.


After getting down the mountain we drove into Breckenridge and had a couple of great burgers. After stuffing ourselves with food I drove us to Winter Park where we found a camping spot and attempted to take a much wanted nap. Stupidly, we had set up our tent in the sun and as soon as we painfully crawled in for a snooze we realized it was like sleeping in an oven. Rain clouds were looming on the horizon so we didn't quite dare leave the fly off the tent and that didn't help. Slowly we managed to crawl ourselves out of the tent, pick it up, and move it to a shady spot. Then we napped. I think we both could've slept for the night but I woke us up and insisted on ice cream. After a quick trip to town for ice cream, we hunkered down in the tent for the night as the rain moved in. Chris creamed me in a game of travel Scrabble and we turned in for the night.


Saturday morning we stiffly rolled out of the tent and made our way towards the deli in Winter Park for EXCELLENT breakfast burritos. Wow, seriously YUM. Chris's was called "The Heart Attack" -- that's how awesome it was. Mmmmm. Anyway, Saturday we met up with the usual gang for a preride of the next Winter Park race. The race itself is about 19 miles but it starts in Winter Park and ends in Frasier so then we had to ride back on a slightly uphill bike path. In all it was a hard 30 miles on the mountain bike -- officially my longest mountain bike ride to date. The course was a lot of fun, minus a few select parts. I'm looking forward to the race on Saturday but also nervous. We'll see how it goes. I felt pretty good on the ride on Saturday and that was after climbing a 14er the day before and having really stiff muscles all over my body. Should be a lot of fun!
This is a classic face!

My "injury" from falling ungracefully into the river crossing on the bike.

Well, we had some aspirations to possibly climb Mt. Sherman or the Lincoln/Bross/Democrat/Cameron group on Sunday but we were both wiped and quite sore. We will definitely be doing those before summer rolls to a close though. There's nothing like climbing up to 14,000+ ft with your favorite person in the world to make you forget about the stress of life down at 5280. We had a great weekend topped off by a nice surprise visit from my sister, niece, and nephew. We all visited the Butterfly Pavilion and hung out a little. We have pictures from that but that will have to wait for us to download them.

What a great weekend despite some lingering soreness and tiredness. Chris took me to ride Marshall Mesa last night (a ride that we rode a few times back in college and I hadn't ridden in a while) -- my legs felt like total junk. My entire body felt completely worthless at riding a bike. The 10 miles was fun but also a little more painful than it should've been. Today I'm taking the day off the bike due to a nice muscle strain in my hip from a wicked garage-door-closing incident. Note to self: not a great idea to try to leap over the garage door sensor in flip flops and short skirt when your legs are already not working right. Ouch.

That's the end of my story. For now.