Summer Fun, 2013

We got to have Hannah home with us for three months before she left for Brazil!  It was so much fun.  She had two jobs, DSW and MagneLab, so she was pretty busy, but we still found time to squeeze in some good times together.  One of the best things we did was to go to the Denver Temple with Hannah for her first time.  It was a beautiful day and she was very happy.  

Hannah and I had a girl's weekend away June 20-22.  We started by going to the Temple and having dinner at Cheesecake Factory in the Park Meadows Mall in Southeast Denver.  Then we went to the Outlet Mall in Castle Rock to shop for a little bit.  We've had fun getting skirts and cute tops for her mission.

On Friday morning, we drove to Breckenridge, Colorado.  It was absolutely beautiful there!  We went to the Mountain Sanctuary Day Spa for massages and then had lunch on this beautiful rooftop patio overlooking the ski slopes.

We checked into our condo and relaxed a little bit by the pool before heading to dinner at the Blue River Bistro.  It was fun to try a lot of different things on the menu which we shared so that we could get a variety.  We ate outside (which is always my first choice) and they offered us blankets for when it started getting chilly.  We didn't really need them but thought that was cool!  We walked back through town and stopped at Coldstone for a treat before going back to our place.  We watched a movie that we had borrowed from the library (can't remember what the name was) and then went to sleep.

The next day we got up and had donuts for breakfast and then we went up the Gondola and hiked around some.  It was pretty hot, so we didn't hike much and it was just up and down a ski slope so it wasn't that wonderful of a hiking spot.  We spent most of the afternoon shopping at the Silverthorne Outlets.  Who knew that Van Heusen would have so many perfect sister missionary clothes?  I thought they were a men's clothing store!!

Once we got back down from the mountains, we ate dinner in Boulder at a wonderful restaurant called Cafe Mexicali that was just like Cafe Rio or Costa Vida, so we were very pleased.  Afterwards, we ended our great time by seeing the new Monsters University movie.  We both really enjoyed it!  We enjoyed the whole weekend!  It was really good for Hannah to have some time off--she had been working pretty hard since she got home at the first of May.

For the 4th of July, we (Mike, Hannah, and I) celebrated at our good friend's the Robertson's house.  We had a delicious BBQ with lots of side dishes and really fun yard games and then our own fireworks show in their driveway.  Tanya and her boyfriend, Clay, bought some pretty cool ones in Wyoming on their way over from Utah.  Shelly, David, and Christian Trane were there as well as some of Phil Robertson's family from Ft. Collins and Sharma's brother, Lyman.  We all enjoyed ourselves very much.  Happy Birthday, America!!  We love you!

The following weekend, our sweet granddaughter, Meggy, came to spend some time with us.  She was in Colorado babysitting for a couple of her nephews (Jenny's brother Jared's kids) for a couple of weeks in Aurora so we went down and picked her up and brought her to Longmont.  We stopped and ate pizza at BJ's before heading home.  On Saturday, we thought it would be high adventure to grab some tubes and float on the river in Lyons, Colorado, about 30 minutes from our house.  It was a lot of fun except we wish we would have had much larger, more stable tubes!  

Meggy approaching her first "rapids."

"That was pretty fun!" 

Here comes Hannah heading down the same ones...

A good place to be on a hot summer day!

After tubing, we ate lunch by the river in Estes Park, bought the girls souvenir t-shirts, and stopped for treats at Laura's Fudge Shop.

We headed to Joel and Erin's for dinner (we brought this wonderful chocolate, peanut butter, banana cream pie that was to die for).  We had a fun BBQ with burgers and corn and had to eat inside because it poured rain!  We thought Joel was going to be hit by lightning going back and forth to the BBQ!  Luckily, he made it through the storm!  After dinner, we showed our pictures of Italy and then we took Meggy back to Uncle Jared's house.  We sure loved having her with us and can't wait to do that again!