2018 Breckenridge Snow Sculptures

If it's January in Colorado, you know that the International Snow Sculptures will be coming up soon.  We always look forward to a day in the mountains, in one of our favorite mountain towns and looking at these incredible snow sculptures.

We spent nearly 3 hours making the hour and forty-five minute drive up the mountain because there were not one, not two but three major accidents on the West-bound lanes and it made all of the traffic slow to a crawl.  So by the time we arrived in Breckenridge we were starving.  Good thing there are lots and lots of yummy places to eat!  After a quick meal we headed out to see the show.

And once again the sculptures didn't disappoint!

2018 Ice Castle

Mark:  What are we doing this weekend?
Me: Playing Frozen.
Mark: Playing what?
Me: Frozen.
Mark: *deep sigh*

He thought I was kidding! But I actually found an ice castle for us to go to that would have made Elsa and Olga (or whatever the Frozen movie character's names are) very proud! We went to an actual Ice Castle in Dillon, Colorado.

 

 I got tickets for us to go through it in the late afternoon so that we could see the place in natural light and then we could see the place with all of the colorful lights after dark.

This place is really neat.  The Ice Castle is made by hand and they add over 10,000 icicles to the creation every day.  They have other castles in several other places; Utah, Minnesota, Alberta Canada, New Hampshire and Winnipeg, Manitoba.  This thing was pretty massive. The Ice Castle weighs about 25,000,000 pounds and the walls are about 10 feet thick, so its pretty heavy and strong! There are small caves that only little kids can climb into, dancing water features, slides for big kids and little kids, passageways that lead from one room to another, long hallways that have thousands of icicles hanging down from overhead, rooms with ice windows in them and 25-30 feet towers that enclose the whole castle.  

Windows in the walls

The ceiling in one of the passageways

 

 

                                                         Mark going down the ice slide

The ice during the day was naturally a beautiful ice-blue color but as the sun went down the castle looked completely different with the multi-colored lights that they had placed deep within the walls of the structure.

2017 Christmas

This year the girls were with their other families for Christmas and Mom and Dad were with Robert and his family so Mark and I went to Texas to see his mom and dad.  Most of you know that Mark's mom has had some health issues these last few months and it was a much needed visit to be with them. 

We spent 5 days with Mark's parents and 3 days in Odessa and enjoyed our time visiting with his sisters, brother in law and Henley and Blaine and Joyce and Paul.  Unfortunately we didn't get to see Delaney and Zack because they had to be back in Austin by the time that we arrived in Odessa.

All in all it was a great Christmas and we were happy to see many family and friends that we could.

Beautiful Texas sunsets every evening

Loving on Henley's pups

Of course Mark had to get his Whataburger fix!

Christmas Lights at the Denver Botanic Gardens

Okay- truth be told here.  This is actually called "Blossoms of Lights at the Denver Botanic Gardens" but come on...these are clearly Christmas lights at CHRISTMAS time so I'm calling it what it is...Christmas Lights at the Denver Botanic Gardens.  SO there.

My next-door neighbor was unexpectedly given 2 tickets at the last minute and asked me if I was interested in going to see the display with her and as it happened, Mark was in North Dakota and I was free for the evening.  I think you can see that they did an amazing job of decorating the gardens.  I took some pictures but they didn't turn out very good so I borrowed these from the internet so that you can see just how pretty it was. 

2017 Berthoud Christmas Parade

Let's face it.  Christmas in a big city is excessive; everything is bigger, brighter, flashier and MORE CROWDED! 

A few years ago we went downtown to see the Denver Christmas Parade and we couldn't see anything because of the 100,000+ other people who came to see the parade. 😕 Actually we saw the tippy-tip-tops of the floats because we climbed up on top of a wall so that we could see something but it definitely wasn't what we were expecting; and we got there almost 2 hours early and still didn't get a decent spot to view the parade. Not only were there lots of people there but 3 major protests groups were roaming up and down the streets shouting at the crowd with bullhorns to the point we couldn't hear anything but them. 

So this year we decided to go to a smaller venue to get a little dose of holiday cheer and after some internet sleuthing I found the perfect place- Berthoud, CO! We figured that with a population of 5100 people we were pretty sure we might be able to get a front row seat to the parade.  And we were right!  

This was a true small-town celebration.  There were home-made floats, high school bands playing Christmas songs off-key, hot chocolate stands, plenty of farm equipment with a single string of Christmas lights strung on them, kids on their horses with garland and lights hung on the saddles and halters, kids collecting candy that the parade participants were throwing out to the crowd, Santa, the Town Square Christmas Tree lighting, choirs singing under said Christmas trees, and a snow carving contest to boot. Was it small? You betcha! The parade lasted maaaaaybeee 15 minutes but the parade entrants were having a ball and we sure enjoyed the simplicity of the whole event and were glad we found this little gem.