Trip to Denver

On Monday the wife and I just got back from a short trip out to Denver. We flew out last Thursday to surprise my cousin for his high school graduation. While we weren't able to make it out for the actual ceremony, we had it worked out to surprise him at the restaurant for dinner.

I had worked out plans with my aunt to keep things as a complete surprise. When he was standing in line, I snuck up behind him patted him on the shoulder and said "I hear congratulations are in order!" The look on his face was priceless when he turned around. You could see the confusion of "Who is this person that looks like my cousin? That can't be him. Why would he be here in Denver?" A true classic. He was speechless for like the first 10 minutes.

It was a great trip. I've been out to Denver a number of times in the past 25 years, but this was my wife's first trip. In the 5 days we were there we put on 700 miles on the rental car—but those miles pretty much all came on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We drove to Boulder a couple of times, Breckenridge, Estes Park and just explored Denver a bit.

On Saturday, we drove up to Boulder and had lunch at the Walnut Brewing Company—and they had one of the best fruit salads I've had in a long time. The fruit salad was mixed with a combination of cinnamon, honey, lemon juice and sour cream—it was really quite tasty.

After lunch, we drove back to Denver for my cousin's graduation party. My cousin is considerable younger than I am (19 years younger,) so there were always a ton of pictures of the two of us where I'm holding up. Anyway, since he's 6'1" and growing, I figured I better take one last picture before I can't pick him up anymore. :)

It's so hard for me to believe the baby I remember feeding and playing with is now on his way to college to play Hockey.

On Sunday we went up to the Rocky Mountain National Park. While the park isn't completely opened up yet, we were able to make it up to 12,000 ft—so we had a decent view (we couldn't quite make it to the gift shop, the road was closed right before the last leg.) I knew the road would most likely be closed since it wasn't scheduled to be opened up until May 22, but I kept hoping we could make it to the Continental Divide. Alas, it just gives us something to do next time we're in town.

Anyway, here are a couple of panoramic photos I took and stitched together with Windows Live Photo Gallery—which does a wonderful job of stitching photos together.

It was a great trip and I'm so glad we were able to make it out to see my cousin.