Colorado Vacation

Starting the Memorial Day weekend, we went to visit Angela's brother Alan's family in Colorado and then to her sister Adrienne's family in Colorado as well for a week long vacation. On the way there we had sunshine, then rain, then snow, then very dense fog. We must have seen it all. We arrived safely though. On the first day Adrienne's family came up to Alan's and we went to the Swetsville Zoo in Fort Colins. It's a sculpture garden of things made all out of old steel parts and welded together to be these really cool things. We visited this place once before when we lived in New Mexico. Here's a photo of one of Brian's favorite sculptures the two-headed dragon with most of the cousins. There's Marcus out in front and Travis in the back and then from L to R it's Abby, Eric, Christopher, Lucas, Preston, Ryan, and Carson.

Here's another interesting sculpture, this monster car. It was all we could do to get Travis to participate in a family photo. We had to let him choose something to pose in front of and this is what he picked.

Here's the cousins at lunch time with Marcus looking at the camera instead of eating.

The dads and the older kids then went out geocaching. From L to R on the bridge it's Carson, Eric, Ryan, Christopher, Abby, Preston, Lucas, and Travis.

Here's one of the caches that we found. The kids quickly swarmed around it to get first dibs on the toys in it. Lucas was sad that everyone got to it before him so he hung his head and didn't want to look in it (pretty sad).

From L to R on the fallen tree it's Eric, Abby, Christopher, Carson, Ryan, Preston, and Lucas. Don't quite know what Jason was doing in the background of this photo...

We also got a chance to ride on an old trolley line through Fort Collins. We enjoyed this slow ride to an ice cream shop.

We also got to do some good swimming. Here's Marcus and Dad enjoying the pool.

Here's the Anderson and Pippin hoodlums on the stairs. This time we got Spencer in the photo in the orange monkey shirt.

Then we headed down to Adrienne's. They have a cool park near their home with sand and running water to allow the kids to build water systems in the sand. Our boys really enjoyed it. Marcus had some issues with getting sand between his sandals and his feet but he eventually decided it was worth it.

See here he is. Looks like some yummy soup he's making.

During one of the nap times for the youngest Angela and Adrienne took the older ones to the fire station. Here's Eric, Lucas, Travis, and Christopher on the front of the truck (Abby was at school).

Now for the video portion of the blog post. First up we have video at the Swetsville Zoo. There was an area with musical instruments. Travis was able to sound the large horn. He's consistently able to play instruments with mouthpieces. Perhaps we need to get him a trumpet!

Next up some swimming fun.

Then here's some video of Lucas and Travis going down a whale water slide. Marcus even tried this a few times.


Finally we have video of Travis doing the bigger water slide. He's becoming a decent swimmer.