Telluride Recap!

As you see my buddy Marc turned me on to a free blogging site that allows unlimited downloads of pics and is for free right now. It is a pretty simple yet effective site. It is based at www.blogger.com , they ask you for some e-mail address and username and that is it. So far so good.

Morhéa has been soaking up information and words like you wouldn’t believe. The other morning Kim and I were arguing about getting out of Telluride and Morhéa looked at me and said “Mom, you are driving me crazy!” Which is the words mom usually uses to describe me or Morhéa. As I mentioned before we were in Telluride for my buddy Patrick’s wedding. He married a very nice woman named Jeannie who is awesome. All weekend I only heard good things about her from everyone. Their wedding took place at the top of the Telluride ski resort. One of the best towns in Colorado and it might have the best views in all of Colorado. Staying there for 4 nights made us want to stay a lot longer. The wedding also reunited several of the School of Mines crowd (Patrick, Terry, Marc, Tom and Sheila). Hard to believe we graduated almost 9 years ago. We did a lot of catching up and had a great time. Telluride isn’t exactly close to Denver though. We left Denver at 4:30 PM and we were about 3 miles from Telluride when we were stopped because they closed the road to Telluride for construction. We got lucky and the guy in front of us was a local and took us around the construction. Lucky is an understatement! We ended up taking unmarked dirt roads through the mountains at 10:30 at night. If it wasn’t for him we would have had to wait until 1:15AM to get through. In the end it took us a little over 6 hours.

We ended up renting a condo instead of staying at a hotel. The last hotel we stayed at for one Kim’s marathons resulted in all 3 of us going to bed at 9:00 because once Morhéa went to sleep we had no other option other then to go to bed as well. That persuaded us to rent a 2 bedroom condo. We booked it at the last minute and the guy gave us a great deal. I have to admit that this is the 3^rd house/condo I have rented through www.vrbo.com (vacation rental by owner) and so far all have been awesome. If you try and rent this way make sure you do your homework and check the internet for any comments (trip advisor or fodor’s forums) and ask for references. This is a website where owners can rent their own places and thus you get rid of any middle men. The risl is that the place you rent stinks and you are stuck with this dump for the rest of your vacation. We have rented places in Hawaii, St. Marteen and Telluride and all 3 have been great but I did a ton of research on them first! If you want pointers feel free to ask me.

Friday we hit Baked in Telluride for breakfast which has some really good eats. We played around town most of the day. I got my fishing gear together and we did some shopping. That night the Newman’s threw a great party in one incredible house. I think it was a 6 bedroom house (with a side guest house) overlooking the mountains. It was a great party and gave us an opportunity to meet Jeannie’s family. Morhéa got to meet a few girls her age and did whatever they did for the next two days.

Saturday we got breakfast again at Baked in Telluride and I bumped into Marc Oettinger who mentioned that he would like to go fishing with me. We headed out mid morning and had a great time. We drove some mountain dirt road following the San Miguel River through a beautiful valley. It was gorgeous. The river was flowing pretty fast so we didn’t actually fish the river but ended up at Trout Lake which is a beautiful lake at somewhere around 10,000 feet in elevation. Just as we were getting settled in we got little visit from the game warden which cut our trip a little short. Marc “forgot” to buy his fishing license the day before. Fortunately for us we talked about such a situation on the ride up and we did a pretty good job of playing dumb. The warden was nice enough to laugh at our fairly pathetic excuse and let us off with a warning. It was time to go anyway. We headed back to town and got ready for the wedding. As I said before the wedding was at the top of a mountain and was beautiful. This was followed by another great party/reception at La Piazza del Villaggio Ristorante in the Mountain Village. We had the entire restaurant to ourselves and they had nothing but the best Italian food and drinks. We had duck pâté, sushi, these wild mushroom puff pastries, bacon wrapped scallops, fruit sticks for the little ones and a cheese tray for H’orderves. The dinner consisted of an Italian salad followed by lobster ravioli. The main coarse was, Fillet Mignon and lobster tails with a side of beans wrapped in proscuitto. I was too full to even attempt to eat desert so I didn’t. They looked really good though!

Sunday we went to another one of my favorite Colorado towns called Ouray (pronounce U-Ray according to Sheila who says that is how the locals pronounce it). A short 45 minute drive from Telluride, Ouray is more of a locals town with great views. We went made our usual rounds and went shopping, ate some ice cream and ate some lunch. We followed that up with playing in the park which also has great views. Ouray was one of the first towns I stayed in Colorado when I came out here in 1995 to do my geologic field mapping class. I was so blown away by how beautiful it was that it made my want to move here which I did 1 year later!

Monday was our travel day and it took us a lot longer to get home (7+ hours). Traffic in Delta, Colorado!!! Give me a break! Traffic, an accident which closed both lanes of I-70 and construction which also closed I-70 for 15 minute intervals. Morhéa traveled great and thought the entire trip was one long party. She got a little car sick on the way home but was a real trooper and we were proud of her as usual.

I will try and put updates here every so often. I might add other random things like band events, cooking and work related stuff here as well so check back every once and a while. I will send out an e-mail when I make large Morhéa updates.

Todd