more garden / dumpling week

kale

purple cabbage

year of the peppers, by far our most productive crop. I think they love the heat

can you guess what this is? this is my first time growing it



tomatoes are crazy, but not quite ready yet. We grabbed some "scraps" that fell on the ground from Erica's plants. Based on the crop on her dining room table I think she is in overload mode



Random – Dumpling Week

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/08/30/216899819/dumplings-taste-better-when-filled-with-memories

Mom, do you ever make these from scratch? I remember Grandma always used frozen ones. NPR is doing “dumpling week” – different stories on dumplings ever day. When you drive two hours a day, small things make you excited haha.

I have lots of pictures from last weekend at Grand Lake to post, should get to it over the weekend.

US Pro Challenge

My work offered to pay registration for the US Pro Challenge (experience) in Fort Collins yesterday. They had 32, 50, and 108 mile rides. I got my boss and Steph to do the 32mile with me.  My other coworker was going to join us but had a baby yesterday, decent excuse…

We got up early, made the drive up to FoCo. I thought parking would be bad so we met up ~1mile away from New Belgium(the start and finish) and biked there. Steph sadly fell pretty bad on the way to the race. She is OK but scraped her knee pretty bad and bruised her shoulder. She understandable sat the race out. Her great-grandma was randomly visiting south of Foco so she went to see her while we were riding.

We did the 32 mile ride in about 2.5hours, not too bad! We had mountain bikes (99% were road bikes), which ended up being nice as part of the course was on dirt roads.  They had a few food trucks, we got vouchers for lunch and two cans of NBB.  Lots of freebies: Smith sunglasses, pint glass, drifit shirt. I like freebies

My butt is sore today, I think Steph’s whole body is too!

poor steph :(

Lake Finch (2)

From the "lake" camera

Finch Lake - RMNP

This area is regrowing from a fire back in 1978, now the beetles attacked it :(

on the way back, the fog was crazy

spooky

wild flowers were everywhere

more flowers

calypso falls, we took a different path back

hiker steph

there were waterfalls the whole way down

My first time backpacking! We had a group of 5 people, started around 10AM on Saturday, took about 3 horus each way The way there was ALL uphill, roughly 1500’ of gain in 5 miles. Going back was nice but still hurt a different group of muscles. I was sore for a few days afterwards.The lake had three campsites, was very quiet / tranquil. They have a lot of bears in the area, we had to rent a bear canister and keep it away from our site at night.

I’m looking forward to doing another one very soon.

http://www.protrails.com/trail/rocky-mountain-national-park-finch-lake

These are just from my phone. I went to read the newspaper on a rock in the lake, my camera fell out of my pocket and into the water. Being a packaging engineer, I put it in a bag with pharmaceutical grade desiccant for a day, works fine now J