Millards In The Mountains

Matt and I decided to join some of our favorite local breweries yesterday at a craft beer festival to help kick off Colorado Craft Beer Week. It's no secret that craft beer is a huge part of the Colorado economy. Everybody just does it so well out here. It was nice to go to a smaller festival than the Great American Beer Festival where there are too many breweries to even get to every booth. Yesterday's festival felt more like a back yard barbecue. I even got to meet the hosts of the Craft Beer Radio show on AM760. There is a picture of me with Turk and the "Gubna" below. In addition to some good beer sampling, our tickets also included a meal of either beer can chicken roasted for hours on the grill (my choice) or a spicy brat (Matt's choice). The chicken was amazing. I even let Matt try some. :) I also had some fun and took some pictures at the light rail. (We were responsible and walked/rode the train to and from the event.) What a fun day! Even better was c...

We've had some neighborhood visitors recently. This Mallard duck couple has made our yard its home for about a week now. They showed up right before our camping trip and have been around ever since! We can't find a nest but they seem to like prefer our yard, none the less. Maybe it has something to do with the name? My hope is that they really do have a nest nearby and one day I will wake up to little ducklings wandering around our yard!

If you are reading this for the second time, you will notice that I have re-written this post. It seems even my Apple technology is not foolproof. I tried to create a new blog post on my iPad and instead I inadvertantly typed over this original post. Argh. But I want to remember this camping trip, so here I am typing it all out again. As indicated in the title of this post, Matt and I decided that a camping trip in Sand Dunes National Park would be a great way to celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary. Matt has never been and I have been eager to get back there ever since a trip I took with the KU Geography Field Campers in 2006. So last Thursday, we packed up our camping gear and our dogs and headed out to the Dunes. We arrived at the park's campsite around 1:30 pm which was great timing. We had our pick of campsites but the entire thing was full within a few hours. Our site was great...not too close to any others and offered plenty of shade over our tent all day long. We set ...