Colorado Family Reunion Part 2.

Breckenridge, Colorado: Sunday afternoon we headed up into the Colorado Rocky Mountains, to a little town called Breckenridge. There were 25 people from the Booth/Parker clan descending upon this little ski village. We stayed in a resort called Mountain Thunder. We had 3 town homes that would hold 3 families each in them. Each place was beautiful and it felt great to have our own bedroom and bathroom. What luxury! The town was really cute and had great little shops and restaurants. We spent some fun times hanging out downtown, shopping, eating, walking, enjoying the beautiful wildflowers and laughing at the local brewery.

Our town house. You can't see it but our rental car was an HHR, which had us laughing.
A view of the mountains from downtown Breckenridge.
Playing at the little playground at our resort: Shane, Meredith and Brooke. Enjoying some downtime watching a DVD (thanks Julie) and munching on bananas: Meredith and Shane.
Getting our swim on.
We had heard about this train to go on and thought the kids would enjoy it. We set out one morning to find this said train. Carolyn had fun pushing Shane in his stroller.
And here ya go...You can say this wasn't quite what we were picturing. None-the-less, everyone had a good time, me included!

2nd cousins: Shane, Meredith, Brooke, Anna and Carolyn.
Shane getting some love from Bella. The last day we were together, she just couldn't keep her hands off of him. It was super cute, even though Shane wasn't so sure about all the love.
All the 2nd cousins: Shane, Bella, Meredith, Brooke, Eli, Carolyn, Anna, Conner and Garrett.
Hiking: One morning we took a little hike/walk up the hill behind where we were staying. Shane did great, walking about a mile before he asked "uppie". He loved seeing all the plants, streams, bugs and just being a boy in the woods. The highlight of the walk for us was when we saw a fox. She saw us first, but we all stared at each other for a few moments before she took off. She had been hunting, you could see a little rat or mouse tail hanging out of her mouth. Kenny was able to get a quick shot of her running back up the hill.



This was a old gold mine that we stopped off to check out. On the drive up, you could see lots of gold mine stuff leftover in the mountains and tons of mine lefts overs. It was really neat to see.
A view of Breckenridge from our hike.
My little hiker!
We saw these beautiful wild sunflowers all over. I just loved all the wildflowers we saw in Breckenridge and Denver.
Checking out the little stream.
The slide: A bunch of the more brave people of the group went on a big slide that went down one of the mountains. I stayed behind while Shane napped. They had a great time flying down the mountain in little sleds, that had brakes...thank goodness!

Brent and Conner riding up the ski lift to get to the slide.
The slide at the bottom.

Weather: Upon arriving in Colorado, I instantly saw a sign that said "tornado shelter". Ummm...no one told me about this part of our vacation. It turns out there had been a small tornado a couple days before we arrived and the day after we left for Breckenridge there was a huge thunder storm. Glad we missed out on all that weather action. Up in the mountains the weather was crazy though. One second it would be hot, the next windy and rainy. And I'm not kidding, it would be mere seconds to make those drastic changes. Then a few minutes later it would be warm again.

Altitude: One of the more unusal things about our trip was being so high up. When you come from a place that is pretty much sea level and then end up at 9,600 feet, there are alot of differences that you don't realize. I didn't sleep much all week. I had restless sleep issues, which they say are caused by altitude. I didn't have many problems with breathing, except when I laid down it felt like I had an elephant laying on my chest. It could be hard to catch your breath that high up. Our highest point was 11,200 feet when we went through this really really long tunnel to get up and down from Breckenridge. Man, that was one scary tunnel! One more thing about being so high up was how close the stars and clouds are to you. The stars were so low they went behind the trees and the clouds looked like you could touch them. Super cool!

Red Rocks: One of our last adventures was a very quick stop off at Red Rocks in Denver on the way back to the airport. It is this super cool natural rock formation that they have turned into an amphitheater. I would love to see a concert there!