Combo Post! Days 10 & 11 - Lake City, CO - Almont, CO - July 25/26, 2009

Good morning to all!!

I’m working on a combo post today because we just didn’t have the internet signal the last couple of days to get one up and we were traveling a bit between cities. We are settled again in Almont, CO, which is just south of Crested Butte.

We’ll catch you up though....

Saturday - Lake City, CO

We didn’t get started until a little later in the morning today. Of course, I was up, but the rest of my family was snoozing. One by one the awoke and we waited for the next one, until finally, I just woke John up when the rest of us were restless. We also made a decision today to leave the Texas Resort and stay Saturday night in Gunnison. Why? Good question. While the Texan Resort was OK, don’t let the “Resort” in that name fool you. Not a “Resort” in the way we think of “Resorts”. In fact, our cabin was down right rustic. There is Really Rustic which means - no electricity, no running water inside the cabin, outhouse. I consider that Really Rustic. The only difference between the Texan and that is there was electricity, running water and the bathroom was inside. The cabin .... though.... very rustic. The flooring was simply ply wood with no flooring over it in many places which made splinters in your tootsies a risk when walking around on it. They did have a refrigerator which didn’t work. When mentioned to the owner, he simply said it would take a week or so to get someone out to fix it. So sorry. It wasn’t bad... it just wasn’t great. And not knowing really what I had reserved up in Almont (for certain), I wanted at least one night in a hotel bed with a nice shower.

But.. before we left, we made a great drive up to Engineer Pass which is at 12,000 elevation. Beautiful drive.... beautiful mountains. The weather changed about half way up to cold and wet again today, so my pictures weren’t quite as good as they could have been had it been sunny and blue outside! No worries though... we got some great pics. See below.

One really interesting thing we saw as that almost to the top - in the Alpine Tundra - someone has built a pretty little house that is only accessible by a bridge over a crevice!! Here are the pictures!! I just had to take them because it was so strange to see this house up here. My thoughts of this were wow, you have to have a lot of extra money to build a house WAYYYY up here, only accessible for four (maybe five) months of the year!!



After our trip up/down Engineer Pass, we packed our stuff and drove the hour into Gunnison to stay at a really nice and new Holiday Inn Express!! Call me spoiled. Yes... I am. And it was nice! We had a pizza dinner tonight at a great place in Gunnison called Pie-Zans. The pizza was excellent and not terribly expensive as many of the other places in the mountains were very expensive.





Sunday - Almont, CO
This morning was another leisurely morning however, this time spent at the Holiday Inn Express! Had a great breakfast here and just lounged until they kicked us out at 11:00 am checkout time!! What’s up with that?? :-)

Packed up the Jeep again which is just bulging at the seams right now and headed to the grocery store to pick up just a couple of items. Can’t pick up more than a few otherwise we’ll be sitting on them! Jeep is full. Hit the grocery, gas station and headed up to Crested Butte to hang out with my parents and Perry until our cabin was available for check in later this afternoon.

Perry rented a beautiful house in South Crested Butte for a few weeks. Graciously invited my parents along for the stay as well as my other sister, Stacey, and my 4 nieces/nephews. Perry, Meme and Poppy arrived there on Friday and Stacey and crew to arrive late Sunday evening.

A little wrinkle in the fun this time is my Mom has some lung issues and it’s been getting harder and harder to come up to this altitude for her over the past couple of years. On Friday, when they arrived, her oxygen stats dropped into the low 80’s with some readings in the upper 70’s so off she went to the hospital. They fixed her up with some portable oxygen and she was back home later that evening. She’s slowly acclimating to the elevation but it’ll take a little while. I know she’s not happy about it as it restricts what she can do for now. However, she’s doing better each day being able to spend a little more time off the oxygen without her stats plummeting.

We had a nice afternoon/evening with my parents and Perry. John the Great made a fabulous BBQ dinner of ribs, chicken, corn and salad!! It truly was devine. We didn’t eat until 9:00 pm, but it was wonderful. Worked out that my sister Stacey arrived literally right in time for dinner!! :-)

We played games and just hung out. John, Dad and I went and checked into our little cabin at Three Rivers Resort which is really cute. Really little, but cute and nice. Clean.... comfortable.... coffee maker.... working refrigerator. What else do we need?

It’s Monday when I’m typing this and today... we are going fishing. With a bunch of kids. Likely not to catch a thing with all the noise from the kids. But... we will have fun (hopefully) trying!!

I’ll post pictures from Sunday later today.

PS - Please take a moment and pray for a little baby boy (9 months old) named Stellan. You can find his Mama’s blog on the right hand side under “My Charming Kids”. This little baby boy is currently in the hospital deteriorating rapidly from a heart problem. He and his family need a army full of prayer warriors right now.

MA