My summer vacation

Let's be honest: my whole life is basically one long vacation. But my summer break from blogging was so nice. Thought I'd give the highlights before resuming the feed.

First stop back from the land of Oz was Milwaukee for some really lovely family time over the 4th of July and beyond. 

My nieces and nephews continue to grow like weeds and I'm grateful for every second I get to spend with them.

Grateful, also, for the chance to spend a weekend with my sweet Grandma in central WI. In this picture, grandma, my aunt C, and niece R: four generations of the fam...and R in 7th heaven thanks to C giving her her first fishing experience as part of her birthday weekend adventure.

From Milwaukee I headed to Denver and caught up with as many friends there as I could in too-short a time. I was especially lucky to be taken to the Denver Botanic Gardens, which is hosting a Chihuly exhibit. This is actually a photo I took, believe it or not. There were so many scenes that looked totally unreal, it was hard to know where to start with the gaping and the pictures.

From Denver, up to the mountains for most of the month of August. Too many fabulous experiences there to even summarize. Suffice it to say we had an idyllic time going to the Avon rodeo (which my mom has been talking about doing for the past 20 years, but which we've never before done)...

...riding horses...

...being silly...

...going on hikes...

...visiting the Western CO ranch of family friends who were brave enough to host our group of 8 for 3 blissful days...

...riding the narrow gauge railroad from Durango to Silverton and back...

...catching up with sweet Peace Corps-Madagascar friend (and CO native) K (including a hike to Hanging Lake)...

...and revisiting, for the first time in many years, the gorgeous Piney Lake...

...which was during part of the time we got to enjoy a visit with my baby bro, C...

...and my mom got to see a bunch of those moose she so dearly loves and is willing to drive 45 minutes on bad gravel roads to see:

All in all, as golden as a summer can get.
Though I can't say I really got my fill of family time--with such a fun family, such a thing is not possible--the end of summer meant back to business as usual for everyone else, and so I boarded a plane to the East Coast to continue my own (non-)business along the Atlantic.

Holidays. Happy.

After my stint in WI, half the family jetted to Colorado to start the holiday festivities in the mountains while my sister and I piled into her car with all four of her kiddos and headed there on the slow boat: 20 hours through WI, IL, IA, NE, and finally CO. There was a great deal of silliness along the way. Which my cousin, R, seemed to anticipate when I told him about the upcoming drive and he said, "Wait. The adults going in the car are…you…and your sister?" The way he said it, I could almost hear the air quotes around the word "adults." I guess we deserved that.

Safely arrived in Colorado, before the craziness of a house full of 12 people really got going, I snuck out for a rendezvous with my sweet Denver friend M, who has been living and working in Brazil for the past couple years and happened to be home for a vacation. Lucky me, to steal a few hours of her time to catch up.

After that, it was all-out. Sit-down with Santa for the kiddos (during which Santa almost broke character laughing when my niece E pulled out a full-fledged toy brochure to show him exactly what she wanted)…

…horse-sleigh rides (though we had to settle for pictures with the horses in the background during their break, too busy were they to give us riffraff a ride)…

…the idyllic Christmas morning with a tree drowning in presents…

…sledding on Christmas afternoon…

…downhill skiing--lots for some of us, a day or two for others…

…and New Year's Eve fireworks. All of us looking up at them, and looking forward to 2014.

Home sweet Denver

Apparently I'm on vacation from my vacation, because I've been absolutely inconsistent with taking photos of my lovely time in Denver catching up with so many friends. In particular, I really failed at getting shots of my time with former co-workers who are now, simply, friends. Here are a few pictures I did take, in case anyone reading knows any of these great people and would be happy to see them smiling (and, in this first case, with a baby who was still in utero when I left Denver in the springtime!).

I also got to spend an entire weekend up in Avon with eight of my Denver girlfriends, which was a wonderfully relaxing way to catch up with people. There were several art projects going on, lots of good food cooked and shared, and even lessons given in poi and belly dancing. So fun!

Last leg

It truly blows my mind, but after I left Austin, I had just one last week to close the loop on my 7.5 month North American road trip extravaganza. Heading north out of Texas, it was finally getting too chilly out for me to comfortably sleep in my car wherever I found myself when darkness fell. That made the trip feel almost over more than anything else, really.

After Austin, I visited my friends, the R family, in Oklahoma City. When I was in Madagascar and S and B were teaching at the American school in Antananarivo, their son N was barely a toddler, and their daughter A was only just in utero when they returned to the States at about the same time I left Mada. Look at them now!!

We had a great (though too short, of course) catch-up for an overnight, and then I made the day-long trek from OKC to colorful Santa Fe, NM.

I'm lucky enough to have gotten to visit Santa Fe several times in the past, so with the weather and calendar ticking in my ear, I didn't linger more there more than one night before hopping up to Ojo Caliente hot springs--a place I'd long heard of but never previously made it to.

SO worth the trip, especially for the mud pool, which I haven't ever gotten to experience anywhere else. You're supposed to soak down in the pool, get out and slather mud from a poolside clay pot all over yourself with a big paddle, and then sit and bake in the sun till the mud dries before hopping back in the mud pool to wash off the crusty layer. I tried real hard to follow the routine but it was too chilly for me to succeed in sitting in a lawn chair until I was fully dry. I may have cheated.

And then, I kind of cemented my apparent obsession with hot springs (how did this happen? I LOVE them!) and headed north to Valley View Hot Springs (operated by the Orient Land Trust) in Villa Grove, CO. I crossed back into what now feels like my second home state under the cover of darkness (which is falling so early these days! Gone is my summer of 11 p.m. sunsets in northern Canada), got a bunk bed at the springs lodge, and woke in the morning to this view out of the window of the lovely San Luis Valley.

This place was on my Colorado hit list for pretty much the entire 6 years I was living in Denver, and I never made it out there any weekend, so it felt like a moral imperative to work it into my itinerary. Valley View has a bunch of pools spread out over the property, and when I walked to the most distant trio, just a quarter-mile from the lodgings, I was completely by myself for the 2+ hours I floated, daydreaming, in the perfectly warm water. I had quite a roster of road tripping adventures to think back on and appreciate in the crisp, quiet autumn morning…which quickly became afternoon.

Finally, fully saturated, soaked, and scrubbed clean, I climbed back into my car for the penultimate time and watched the sun begin to set behind the Rockies…

…on my way to Avon for the weekend. There, I unpacked my beloved CRV home/car, detail cleaned it in preparation for our impending goodbye, and then with just the couple of bags I'll need for the next month or so, I made the finally leg of the drive down to Denver, arriving where I started out from way back on April 1. Not quite able to believe it was over.