The Big Trip: The Lake House

Ah...back in LA. It's nice to feel the sea breeze after a week.

The trip was better than expected. I kept my expectations low given the amount of car time, packing and unpacking, etc. But most everything went great. The HB's always been a good traveler, and he was quite the trooper this go around.

I had plenty of wifi, but not much time to post, so here's what happened (in multiple installments).

LA to Denver was no problem. It's just that DIA is so huge that everything takes for fucking ever. And the wife insisted on checking our bags. But, we got our car (and upgraded to a Sebring with satellite radio) and got to our friends' place in Boulder at 10pm.

I've known Louis since junior high school. He and Reggie have been married for, oh, probably 20 years now and have lived in CO for the last 15. They have a boy who's a year younger than the HB and a girl who's about 18 months older. We've gotten together with them in CA before, so there were no problems with the kids. Louis is a physical therapist by training, eventually got an MBA and now runs an orthopedict surgery practice. Reggie was a middle manager for a big hardware company, took a huge buyout and now works for a middle sized consulting company. They live the full-on Boulder lifestyle in that they bike, ski, play tennis, etc. They'd been asking us to come to CO forever, so I finally convinced the wife that we should do it.

They have a house near Lake Granby. And when I say a house, I don't mean some dusty two bedroom shack they visit twice a year. It's a 5 bedroom, 5 bath place that they lived in for a year while Louis was finishing up his distance MBA. It's a good thing it was so big because two other sets of friends came. One was our vacation buddies and their kids. The other was a recently divorced buddy (another guy I've known since high school) and his kids. Despite loving to party when she was younger, his ex-decided that god was more important than her husband. Both of his boys have varying degrees of Asberger's syndrome. The older one who is going into high school seems to either have a better handle on it or fewer obvious symptoms. The younger one, who is 12 seems to have a heavy dose in that he's socially immature, ruminates about everything and seems to be missing the editor between his brain and his mouth. He's a good kid, but, sheesh, can he talk.

So, we all got out to the lake house around lunch time on Saturday. We went horseback riding (I think I was on Valium, the wife was on Xanax, etc.) and hiking around. Reggie made a great dinner, the kids had a good time and the adults put away the booze. Good times.

Sunday morning a batch of us when fishing (no luck) while the first crew went on the boat for some skiing/tubing. They had quite the tubing contraption in that it was a mini inflatable sofa that sat 3. You could not wipe the smiles off of the kids' faces when they were on it (I'm sure that I was the same way). The HB managed to get flung out of it, but got right back on.

After getting back fromthe water, we ate some lunch and went up to Grand Lake. The highest elevation natural lake in the US (woohoo). Since our vacation buddies headed out early, we wanted to get an early start to have dinner with them before the first of our big drives.