Our Backyard

No, not the backyard of the house... although there's a good bit of debate at Casa Marchese these days about the merits of a leaf blower. We have a perfectly good rake.

I owe pictures from the back-East vacation tour where much fun was had with friends and family. Big thanks to anyone who housed us, fed us, or celebrated our good fortunes with us.

We returned to tackle the next stages of nesting in the new house. Translation: a week of couch-potato, cable TV-indulging, crashing.

But since Paul has the extremely-rare Saturday off this weekend, my blood is pumping again-- particularly to get out and enjoy Colorado fall before it's passed. We're actually lucky it's lasted this long but we've enjoyed a couple of weeks of moderate weather and I'm hoping the aspens are clinging to their bits of gold like Lucky and his Magically Delicious Charms.

The tricky thing is deciding which direction to head. The best northern leaf peeping comes with Elk bugling and it's in Rocky Mountain National Park, outside of Estes Park. But we've been there a few times {Paul's only been once-last October and it snowed}. West leads to Buena Vista and Salida and the stunning Collegiate Peaks. The drive southwest to Cripple Creek pulses with a rich vein of aspens in the mountainside and the little once-mining-now-gaming town has an endearing community theater is doing some Frankenstein show. That's a good keep-local option since it's only about 90 minutes. Southward lie the Wet Mountains, the Spanish Peaks and a ton of places either of us have yet to explore, like the Great Sand Dunes {I kid you not} or taking a ride on the Rio Grande Scenic Railroad.

Okay... so this post was shelved until Monday. We picked north, driving to Grand Lake - a mountain lake town neither of us had visited before that sits on the west side of RMNP. While our weather was mixed, Grand Lake was out of a postcard and we loved it-- especially the weekend breakfast buffet at The Fat Cat. On Sunday, we drove over the Trail Ridge road, up to the tundra fields at over 12,000 feet, above the clouds, and down through the aspens [east side of park aspens above] and evergreens to Estes Park.
As Horace Albright, director of the National Park Service in 1931 during the road's construction said, "You...have the whole sweep of the Rockies before you in all directions." Lovely time spent in the backyard.