Colorado Ski Trip February 2011

Krzysztof and I took a ski trip to Colorado in February. Because of being pregnant 2 years ago and nursing last year, it had been 3 years since I had been on the slopes, so I was really looking forward to this trip! And this was the first time KZ and I had planned to go away together without Brandon for more than one night his whole life! And we were going to 2 of our favorite places: Vail, where we got engaged 7 years ago and Copper Mountain, where we had an amazing trip together several years ago. We were so excited about this trip.

All in all, it was fairly good...not amazing as we expected as I'll explain later.

First of all, we left Brandon with KZ's parents at our house. There is a blog post about that prior to this one, or you can go to it here. Actually, this is one of 4 blog postings that I've done today (I know...I'm a slacker for waiting so long to do these!), so if you are interested, you might want to check those out too.

So we left on Wednesday late morning for our drive to Colorado. After driving 5 minutes, KZ's parents called us to let us know one of our cell phones was on the kitchen table. Better to know 5 minutes in to the trip than 5 hours! Once back on the road we had a minor car issue that led us to stop after only an hour drive in Topeka, KS at a Ford dealer for them to check it out. Luckily it was a quick fix, and we were on our way, only to realize once on the interstate that the hood was not closed all the way.

Maybe we should have taken some hints from that first hour of our trip that the rest of it was not going to be smooth sailing.

The drive actually took us less time than we expected. We had planned to stop in Denver for the night but decided to cancel our hotel reservation and continue on to the mountains. We drove to Dillon, CO and ate at the Dillon Dam Brewery which we've both been to separately before. It was great to finally be there, but it was COLD! The temperature was 12 BELOW zero when we got to the restaurant. We stayed at a hotel in Frisco.

Thursday we skiied at Vail, and the coldness continued. I didn't even ski much in the morning because it was so cold, and I felt very very rusty in my skills. The afternoon was a little warmer, and we were able to get some pictures where we got engaged.

Here's where it all happened! At the top of the Mountain Top Express right here by this tree.

And here's a picture from the actual event 7 years ago! This was not staged. We were on the trip with a couple of my girlfriends from grad school, and they got to be photographer and videographer during the proposal! Notice we haven't changed our clothes for 7 years...we do both have newer skis, and we wear helmets now, though.

Thursday evening we drove over to Copper Mountain where we stayed for the next 3 nights. We stayed right in the village, which was so great and convenient. Many of the units there have kitchens, but we opted to just get a regular room so we wouldn't feel obligated to do grocery shopping and cooking.

Our room was really cute.

This is the view out of the main window. This is Central Village. The lift is just beyond the left border of this picture.

In the above picture of our room, this is the window above the couch. It was great to be able to lay on the bed and look at the slopes, which I ended up doing more often that I wanted to.

We had a good day skiing on Friday. I was feeling much more confident by the end of the day and excited to have 2 more days to ski.

Friday afternoon we celebrated Apres Ski at JJ's, one of our favorite places at Copper that has live entertainment.

That's all the pictures we have together. I was really sick by the following morning and spent the next 2 days in bed most of the time. It was a combination of a sinus infection, bronchitis, and altitude sickness. Ugh! The funny thing is, I got this on the trip when we got engaged! I guess this island girl can't take the altitude!

It was great to get away, but we wished we would have been able to have more fun skiing and hanging out together as I was not the most fun person to be around those last 2 days!