Urban Assault

Last Saturday the Wife and I rode our bikes approximately 35 miles around downtown Denver, a trip punctuated at various intervals with, in order: a paperboy route, "significant other piggyback polo", "Shipwreck Falls" water ride at Elitch Gardens amusement park, piecing together a puzzle made out of large segments of carpet, "human bowling" via "skateboard sledding", and riding giant rubber duckies across the vast expanse of a swimming pool. This was Denver's version of Urban Assault, a yearly event that occurs in about 10 cities across the country. It's cause celebre is to promote biking in urban areas, but really it's just an excuse to have a lot of fun and drink free beer once you are done riding a route of your choosing that must include eight different checkpoints before heading back to the start for a grand party and a chance at raffle prizes (run-on sentence duly noted, but I'm not going to revise it so deal). Some of us got a nice sunburn (hint - it was not me), but a great time was had by all and we certainly intend to do this again pending our location next year.

Italy...

was fantastic!

We had so much fun hiking around some beautiful mountains and hanging out with Dad and Dan.  We were in the Dolomites, a range that's a part of the Alps but has different geology.  I hope I got that right.  Anyway, it was beautiful.

Getting to Italy was a mess!  If you fly EasyJet in Europe, you might want to get to the airport about 5 hours early.  Better yet, don't fly EasyJet unless you want to be super stressed on your vacation.

When we did get to Milan, we met up with Dad and Dan and jumped on a train (or two?  I should really have blogged while my memory was fresh.)  Then, we caught a bus.  We were supposed to catch a second bus, but haha it was Sunday and we had planned with the only bus schedule on-line which turned out to be the weekday schedule.  We were able to take a taxi for that last leg, so it turned out ok.

The hotel was a traditional style for the area, which is in the north of Italy.  In fact, more people speak German than Italian.  So much for the Italian/English phrase books I checked out from the library!  The food was amazing.  It was a mix of Italian,German, and local food.  There was lots and lots of pork.  Every dinner was 5 courses: salad, appetizer, pasta dish, main course, and dessert. And we aren't talking small portions.  We were very pampered.  Jules was in heaven!

The first full day we took one of the ski lift up and just hiked around a bit.  We had a plan but just ended up wondering around.  There were beautiful wildflowers everywhere.  We hiked back all the way down and that's where we encountered the most beautiful wildflowers.  There were so many different kinds,  completely blanketing the hill sides.

After the first day, we mostly did Via Ferratas, which are trails through the mountains that are hiking with some rock climbing.  The name means Iron Way and it refers to the way you clip into the mountain.  Along the trail, in any even semi-dangerous area there are steel cables, ladders or stemples (think staple) attatched to the mountain so you can clip in.  It was a lot of fun and very challenging, for me at least. Jules had to find ways to make it harder, sometimes making me incredibly nervous to put it mildly.  I think he's part mountain goat.

My sweet husband went first so he wouldn't have to wait for me, the slow poke.  Unfortunately, that means we don't have as many pictures of him.




















Dad got this one of Jules climbing up an old trail that no longer has a cable to clip into and is much more dangerous!  Jules is the crazy guy on the left.

So, that's not us in the picture, but we did climb up that way!
















Overall, it was an amazing trip with way more beautiful pictures than I can post here.  We had so much fun hanging out with Dad and Dan on the trail and at the hotel.  We're so thankful that we were able to go.

England

As summer winds down, I figured I should probably get around to blogging our Europe trip.  Well here it goes...

The plan was to fly into Heathrow then jump on a train south to close to Jess and Gerrard's, but when the airline was looking for someone to bump, we of course volunteered.  Instead of going straight to London from Chicago, we would go to Amsterdam then to London arriving only 40 mins later.  In return, we got to fly FIRST CLASS and got a $400 travel voucher with the airline!  Sweet... until the plane headed for Amsterdam spent an hour and a half on the tarmac.  We of course missed our connection and our train in London.  We've had some interesting luck with air travel lately!

We finally made it onto a train and here's where I admit my nerdiness.  All I could think about was Harry Potter.  Unfortunately the train looked nothing like in the movies, but to my great delight there was a food trolly that passed by.

But enough about the travel.

It was so nice to meet Julian's sister and her family.  They were so very welcoming and warm.  They live in this great cottage called Blue Haze Cottage.  I can't believe we didn't manage any pictures of it, but I did find it on Google Maps.  I don't know if this will work, but here's the link.

We had such a good time exploring the area.  We went down to a World Heritage Site on the coast.  Multiple layers of rock are visible in the cliffs along the English Channel, testament to the relentless progression of time through the millenia.  There were lots of school groups admiring this lovely geology while we were there.

What kind of trip to Europe would it have been without a trip to a castle?

My favorite outing was to the church fete (pronounced 'fate' for all us Americans).  Basically, a fete is a church fair that serves as a fundraiser.  Jess' family helps out each year at the fete coming up with different booths or stations or whatever you want to call them.  Jules and I got to help with this year's activities.  I helped touch up the paint on some plastic fish that were for a little kids' fishing game.  Jules got in on the big project.  In the course of one morning Gerrard, Jules, Nigel and Jeff (the two oldest boys) made this.

It was a huge hit at the fete.

The other huge hit at the fete was a type of raffle.  For a pound, you picked 5 raffle tickets out of a bingo tumbler.  If any of your numbers was a multiple of 5, then you were a winner.  You went over to a table and found the item which had the same number as yours.  Now, the great part of this raffle was that 95% of the prizes were alcohol!  I guess that's not normal, usually you have a variety of things like stuffed animals and other random things you think of as carnival prizes.  I think that the guys got a bit addicted to this game.  We ended up with oh... about... 10 bottles of alcohol ranging from wines to whiskey to cider.  Julian was the big winner of the day.  He won his very own bottle of ironing water!

Picnic on the beach!

 (the water was freaking cold - lucky we had some rubber dinghies along) 

All in all, our time in Shipton Gorge was much too short.  We had a fantastic time and would love to go visit again tomorrow if we could.