2006 Colorado Christmas - Dec 26

A plan was made last summer to get the Smith family together in Colorado for Christmas. Mostly this was because Kjirsten is expecting grandchild #2 in February, and it would not be really convenient, or easy, for the Wallace family to travel at this time. Laura and Chris would fly out and we would drive our truck in order to have room to haul all the necessary "stuff" to the mountains.

We left Minnesota on Wednesday, December 20, with the idea of arriving in Denver on Thursday in order to help Kjirsten finalize things on Friday before heading to the rented house in Steamboat Springs on Saturday.

Well, it took us three days just to get to Denver because the roads in and out of that place were all closed due to heavy snow and very windy conditions all around it. We decided to go the northern route through South Dakota, since the Nebraska weather forecast was snow, wind, etc., and there was only rain in SD. We stopped in Rapid City Wednesday night and ended up spending a second night as well in that area.

As a result, we had time to see a few things we hadn't before, like the Crazy Horse monument. On the way to this we enjoyed a great German lunch at the Alpine Inn in Hill City, SD.

The first picture is what the project currently looks like. The second one is the model (less Joan) from which they are working. The hole in the mountain represents the space between Crazy Horse's arm and the horse's neck (not really visible in the picture of the model, but is just above and to the right of Joan...essentially under his left armpit!)

We had been in contact with Chris and Laura as we drove to know the status of their flight from Minneapolis to Denver as Denver International Airport was closed from Wednesday until - reportedly - noon on Friday. (They were originally to leave around 7 in the evening and arriving around 8 local time. After a number of time changes - up and back - they finally got to the crowded mess that was Denver airport at about 11:30. Scott and I went to pick them up and found them at the conveyor, nearly hidden by the hundreds (thousands?) of bags already offloaded, but as of yet unclaimed. After about thirty more minutes, their bags arrived and we headed back to Kjirsten and Scott's house. Got to bed about 2 am.

I am writing from the house in Steamboat Springs.
Got here in beautiful weather on Saturday afternoon. Unloaded the truck and car (GOOD thing we brought the truck.!!) and got sort of settled.

The house is made of logs and has three bedrooms, living room, kitchen, two baths and a loft with two beds.

It also has mice!


Sunday morning we went off into the snowy clouds at Rabbit Ear's Pass in the Routt National Forest to cut a Christmas tree.











Put on the snowshoes so as not to sink up to our whatevers as we met the requirement of cutting at least 400 feet from the road, slogged through the deep snow, searched a bit and finally found the "perfect" tree.
We cut -er- down, but were probably about 5 feet from the ground since we were in about 5- 6 feet of snow. Scott and I drug it out of the woods to the road where we were greeted by a passing motorist who had some profanity for us. We guessed it was about cutting the tree. We quickly dismissed any concern and attributed it to his drinking too much fortified egg nog as he barrelled down the road in his gas guzzling pickup with the snowmobile in the back.





With a lot of help from Zach We opened Santa's, and other's, gifts Christmas morning. After this, Joan, Laura, Chris and I headed for the slopes.

We bought a 1/4 day pass and made two runs down the mountain before they closed the lifts. This was probably just right after not having skiied for about 20 years. No one suffered any broken bones or twisted knees, although Joan tried to fill her pants with snow a couple times and, reportedly, Laura ate the mountain once or twice. (To be fair, it must be known that L and C were on the tougher runs and when J had her sit-down problems, it was when we decided to try one of the blue runs.)

Today it looks like everyone is going to just hang out. Kjirsten came up here with a cold - she wasn't going to ski anyway - and Scott seems to have developed one since being here. Zach is sort of just getting over a cold. The rest of us are - til now - ok. Maybe tomorrow the rest will ski again. I think I will not press my luck as there is a lot of baseball and golf to be played down the road.

New plan for the day is for Zach and Joan to play outside for awhile as lunch is being prepared. Then, after lunch and the obligatory naps, we will go into Steamboat Springs to look around the city. We may go to one of of the hot springs for little soak, but that is yet to be decided.

Ou yeah. I remembered to tell Joan "Happy Anniversary" this morning. Thirty-six years already!

Finish Ft Myer Roy Hobbs Baseball Tournament

The Pheasants made it to the final game in the Championship bracket of the tournament with a 3-1 pool play record. We were beaten soundly (15 - 5 in 5 innings!) by the tournament favorite from Detroit in the 3rd game of pool play, mainly as a result of our own errors. I have never seen this group play as poorly as they did in that game. We recovered to enter the championship round at 3-1.

This record seeded us 6th out of 8 teams in the championship. We first played and beat the #2 seed, then avenged our loss against the #1 seed, Detroit. That knocked them into the loser's bracket where they had to win Saturday am to play for the championship. They did and we faced them again Saturday afternoon for all the marbles.

Unfortunately, our starting pitcher had not recovered from the 11 inning game he pitched on Monday and Detroit scored 3 in the 1st and 2 in the second. We hit a bunch of "atems" in those innings, but did not score. From that point on it was a good game, but the damage was done and we lost 13-6.

Everyone was disappointed at the outcome, but by the time we cleared out the dugout were looking forward to coming back next year!