Heading for Glenwood Springs Friday afternoon for a girls' weekend and hit a snow storm right along Vail Pass as the light started to fade.
We got to Hotel Colorado right at dark, grabbed dinner across the street at the Mexican food restaurant before exploring the hotel proper.
They'd already started laying in Christmas decorations in the courtyard, including tubs and tubs of decorations strewn around the porch area.
I got used to being the person always catching up with my roommates because I'd fallen behind to read and/or photograph stuff. But they wisely stayed out of the snow falling outside while I wandered around and enjoyed the fireplace.
We managed to hit the wrong button on the elevator and ended up in the "penthouse" where the Molly Brown suite was even further up another flight of stairs.
I really wanted to poke around -- the door was open and it was clearly being used as yet another staging area for more Christmas stuff -- but my compatriots jumped ship.
After that, we crawled in for the night.
Our view the next morning:
We wandered downstairs for breakfast in the hotel before exploring downtown Glenwood Springs. It seemed the expected all day snow was late in arriving, so we wanted to get in what we could before it rolled in.
We spent a lot of time in the Rock and Mineral store, but I only managed to think to take a couple of photos with my phone of the rock people on the walls.
We stopped in at Doc Holliday's to find directions to Doc Holliday's grave and spent some time relaxing.
We found the path to the cemetery
The climb was a bit more strenuous than I'd anticipated, and of course, I didn't bring hiking boots, so as we're approaching the top, the snow that was late? Yep, it showed up. So after taking a few shots around the place, we needed to get going. Naturally, my hip was already getting inflamed from the climb, and going down on icy slopes while it was snowing meant really slow going. Many thanks to Kathy who grabbed my arm and let me lean on her most of the way down.
We got into Grind for a late lunch right as the snow started like gangbusters.
By the time we got back to the hotel, changed, and got over to the hot springs across the road, you could barely see. There were hundreds of people in the gigantic pools, which run between 90° up to 104°, in the middle of a snow storm. Crazy, but really therapeutic. After more than an hour, I got out to go get my phone to try and capture something of the experience (and it gets REALLY COLD when you get out, especially in bare feet!)
And as I got back from putting my phone away, I reached down to touch the key to the locker with all of my stuff stowed away (not where the towels and phone were) and realized it was gone. It was pinned to my suit and, at some point, who knows when in the past hour, walking all over that pool and outside it, it was gone.
Luckily, both the lifeguard and the lady at the front acted like this was no big deal and said it happened all the time. Of course, I couldn't remember the locker number (it was ON the key) so if anyone had found it, they could've easily gone to it, cleaned it out, and been gone.
They had gotten a key brought to them, so we tried it first, but it wasn't mine.
We tried a few lockers with the front lady's master key, before Kathy discovered that the locker she thought she remembered me putting my stuff in already had the key sticking out of it. There was that couple of seconds where the thought of having just lost all my money and ID flashed across my mind.
Instead, someone had found the key and just put it back into the locker. All of my stuff was inside, exactly where I'd left it.
Between the pain killers I'd taken on a pretty empty stomach before we left for the hot spring, the hot spring itself, and the freak out, I found myself nauseous and ready to collapse. I begged Kathy and Deana to go on out for dinner so I could be miserable without feeling like I was ruining anyone else's evening.
They brought me some magic soup that help immensely, although I just crawled in for the night while they headed down to the lobby and had a raucous evening with a bunch of guests who were huddled around the piano and fireplaces singing Beatles songs. Kathy was begging me to play something else the next morning when she hummed the same bars of "Hey Jude" for the millionth time.
The next morning, our view was decidedly whiter, but the storm had cleared through and we were seeing blue skies for the ride home.
Since I hadn't roamed the courtyard during the daytime on Saturday, I made the rounds again.
We drove over to to Rosi's Bavarian Restaurant for breakfast
And then loaded up for the trip home.
They'd been decorating all weekend and this morning? Laying in real, baked gingerbread and icing on the walls.
I wanted to get one more chance at the courtyard now that the sun was over the ridge.
Deana and Kathy, patient and waiting in the car for me.
The rest of the photos are of the ride home, mostly of Glenwood Canyon in the morning sun and 19°
Aspen Runs not open yet:
Vail Pass, with considerable better weather going rather than coming.
Lake Dillon, our last stop before getting back to the Front Range.
