After the tent trailer debacle Jen and I decided that we weren't quite ready to give up on our Colorado vacation just yet. We got home and with a little advice from my sister-in-law we booked ourselves four tickets to Colorado on priceline.com. We got back to Oregon at 5:30 in the morning one day and left for Colorado at 8:00am the next day. My folks let me borrow a car so we pretty much got into town, went to my folk's house to say hi and pick up the car and headed out for camping.
We were camping in Buffalo Creek, which is in Pike National Forest, about two and a half hours southwest of Denver. It was a great tent camping area, and kind of on the rustic side, with no water save for a spigot that served the entire camp.
We were camping with my brother and his wife, Kacie, and my three nieces Bethany 9, Brynlee 2, and Katie, who is 1. Here's a picture of Brynlee and Bethany with Andrew and Brianna:
Brynlee is at a great age and I had a great time getting to know her better.
One of the nights at the camp I made a fire in the pit and she was hanging out with me. She wanted to help so I asked her to find me little sticks and told her if she gave them to me I would throw them in the fire. Over and over she'd say "Here, Uncle Dave. I have one. Here, put it in the fire! Put it in there!" and I would take the stick and throw it in the fire. Sometimes she'd pick up something that wasn't a stick and I'd say "There's something wrong here." and she'd say "Oh! That's a rock." and throw the rock on the ground disgusted. One time I was waiting after she gave me the stick, just holding it in my hand and she goes "Throw it in there, Uncle Dave! The fire loves it! Go ahead!"
Another cute thing she does is whenever she is trying to get a grown up to do something she says "It's good!". Since we got back from Colorado I've been doing the same thing to Jen whenever I'm trying to talk her into something. "Go ahead, Jen, it's good!"
Katie was also just as sweet as she could be. For those that aren't familiar with this part of Colorado it's super dry in terms of very low humidity and pretty dusty, not dissimilar from eastern Oregon. The whole week we would clean the kids with baby wipes and just about the time we finished with the second kid the first kid would be just as dirty as when we'd started. We were all covered in dirt for most of the time.
We did a fair amount of hiking while we were there. We went up to Crystal Lake during one of the days and had a great walk around the lakes there.
The day after our Crystal Lake hike we went with one of our neighboring campers on our first geocache. It was a great one because it was situated out in a burn area that was remote enough to be a fun, somewhat challenging hike, but wasn't so difficult that the kids couldn't have a good time too.
Andrew was one of the first up to the geocache and was super excited to show the box when we found it.
The view from the location was incredible and really let you appreciate the effects of a forest fire.
It was a great trip and we had some really special memories of our families together.
