Your mom and I hopped from Oklahoma to Colorado to ring in New Years with my side of the family after a wonderful visit with her side.
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| We did a lot of flying on this trip, and it's always striking to see the huge expanses between each of these places we go. If it's not impassable mountains, it's usually thousands of square farming plots. We noticed this wind farm as we started our descent into Denver. |
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| Luckily, our trip overlapped a few days with my cousin Nick and his family's visit to Denver. They live in New Jersey and recently bought a huge house out there. Right after we landed, we met them at Dave and Busters to play some pool and have a couple drinks. |
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| My mom still had the Christmas tree up, and it was a real treat to see it after many years without one. This one seemed particularly special, because it was 100% ornaments from my life living at home, dating all the way back to mine and my sister's "Baby's First Christmas" ornaments. |
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| Both my mom and your mom noticed a special event going on at the Denver Art Museum while we were in town, an exhibit called "Passport to Paris" which featured a lot of classic French painters like Manet, Monet, Pisarro, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Degas. We really enjoyed the exhibits, and the museum did a great job putting them in a historical context. |
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| The most important women in my life! |
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| We all had our favorites, and this one was mine. It's called A Childhood Idyll by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. One of his techniques we learned was that he used a blade to scratch out all the brush marks after completing a painting, leaving everything very smooth and realistic looking. |
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| On Sunday we went to watch the Broncos play at a sports bar in the city. My mom has always been a die hard football fanatic for as long as I can remember. |
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| The game wasn't even close. The Broncos crushed their opponents easily, leaving lots for the fans in the room to rejoice about. It was a pretty fun atmosphere. |
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| It was unseasonably warm in Denver, and the air was incredibly clear. We could always see the Rockies jutting along the horizon wherever we went! |
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| The next night we visited Nana and Papa, and on the way Shannon took us by this bench. Nana and Papa placed it as a memorial to their daughter, Christine, who died unexpectedly many years ago when she was just a young woman. Nana and Papa have since basically raised Christine's daughter, my cousin Danielle, who just turned 21! |
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| After seeing some great old photos in Oklahoma, we were treated to some here, as well. This is Nana. She sent this photo to Papa when he was serving in Korea, and he actually had someone paint over it to color it like this. |
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| Back at my mom's place, we saw some more. This is her and my dad Archie back in their honkytonk days. |
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| On my mom's coffee table is this picture of all of us having dinner and sharing a bottle of wine in Carmel over Christmas in 2008, five years ago! |
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| Shannon generously treated your mom and me to a treatment at her salon. I got my hair cut in a more fashionable way (both of the ladies were in agreement that this was a good thing) and your mom had her hair and make up done so that we could all look smashing for New Years Eve. |
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| My company for New Years Eve. We had a fantastic steak dinner before joining some of Shannon's friends and coworkers at a truly spectacular gay club downtown. I got to see my first full blown drag queen pageant. Whew! |
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| Shannon suggested this neat place called Punch Bowl for fun on New Years Day. They had bowling and an arcade and pool and ping-pong. I was able to win a couple games of ping-pong, which felt nice. |
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| It took some finagling at times, but I was able to drag everyone to a few new beer places in Denver, a town which continues to explode in terms of available craft beer. They're mostly very photogenic, well designed, and comfortable places, too, so nobody complains while I roam around with a camera. |
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| We fit another visit to Nana and Papa's, and this time she cooked us goulash and spätzle! While many of these recipes of hers are not special thing in her book, it's always a huge treat for us when we're visiting. |
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| In all the visiting we barely squeezed in a lunch with the Hunter clan. Everyone is doing well, and it was great to hook up with them again after seeing them all in California for our wedding earlier this year. From the left: my brother Ian, my dad Archie (yes, his beard and hair is blue...long story), his ex-wife Laurie, my sister Melanie, and hey boyfriend Olvyn. |
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| On our last day, while my mom was working, I took your mom and Shannon to yet another beer place, a small brewery and coffee shop with this cute resident dog. |
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| We played Sorry! while we sampled some good stuff. Shannon won, which figured. |
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| It was another beautiful goodbye sunset, but not before my mom cooked for dinner her special recipe for beef stroganoff, my favorite recipe of hers, hands down. |
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| By the time we got home, we were exhausted from the trip, but in that good way that lets you know you've had a lot of fun. In seemed like a whirlwind of two weeks! And now it's 2014, which for some reason sounds strange when I say it out loud. |
