A Much Needed Break pt 1

January is over, and that is fine with me. If I could remove any month from the calendar, I would pick January. Cold, long and not very exciting. We knew that we would have two days off from school in February, so we started talking about what we could do. I told Brandon that I wanted to go to CO for some snow tubing. Brandon and I had gone pre-kid days and loved it. I had been waiting for the girls to be old enough to enjoy it with us. I felt like this was the year. Thankfully, when it comes to vacationing in CO, my husband has a hard time saying no. :) So we started planning and praying that everyone would be healthy, the roads would be good, and that he would be a good point in a project to take off a couple days from work.

He was in Kansas for work from Monday - Weds. night, and we hit the road Thursday morning. We weren't exactly sure what we were going to do when we arrived to Denver. (We'd changed our hotel reservations from Frisco to Denver for that night.) Thanks to an ipad and Trip Advisor, I found a candy factory in Denver that gave free tours. Why not? It was something different, fun, and the girls loved getting free candy at the end of the tour.

From there we headed to the outlet malls at Castle Rock. We hit the two main stores we wanted to Nike (my favorite outlet store) and then Under Armour (my #2). We actually got some really good deals. We then ate dinner at Chili's and headed to the hotel back at the Tech Center.

Friday morning we woke up with the intentions of snow tubing back at Copper Mountain. We knew the weather forecast wasn't good, but we waited until that morning to check the road conditions and make a final decision. The roads were not good at all. And really, who wants to drive curvy, steep mountain roads when they are covered in ice and snow? Not us. We were then left with "now what?" We'd told the girls from the get-go that we were going to CO to snow tube on Friday. I will admit; I was discouraged. We had prayed and prayed about this day. Once again, I googled places to snow tube. The majority of places were off I-70, which meant we couldn't get there. However, this search brought up someplace new. A little resort near Red Feather Lake - 2.5 hours away and near WY. However, we decided to make the drive since we had come this far, and the roads looked good. We loaded up and headed north.

It was a really pretty drive into a new area for both of us. We ate at their little lodge restaurant first and then loaded up for the runs.

 We were all excited, and I have lots of pictures to prove it. We loved the pulley system to pull us up the hill! It's a must, and I found it so relaxing on the way up. They had single and double tubes. We quickly fell in love with the doubles, because we went down faster. :) And the girls liked going down with another person.

 The view from the top. Pretty, isn't it?

 Looking down one of the eight runs.

So God knew what He was doing; imagine that. It wasn't the place I had envisioned for the last month, and we weren't back in the big rockies, but there were perks. Such as we practically had the place to ourselves. There were only about six other people tubing when we were. We paid the same price for two hours of sledding that we would have for one hour at Copper. We enjoyed a variety of different runs, and we simply enjoyed laughing and having fun as a family. 

Another perk was since we had driven north, we texted some friends that live in a city along the way to see if they could meet for dinner. We had seen them last August when we were in CO, but just last month they brought home their two boys from Haiti. We met for dinner at CFA and had a great time reconnecting, and I loved meeting those cute, cute boys. It was the cherry on top for me.

Thank you Lord for orchestrating our day.