On Saturday we traveled through Cheyenne and drove around Pine Bluffs, WY where Meg’s family lived when she was born. It was fun to see the area and we even discovered a distillery in Pine Bluffs. We then drove another 5 hours across Nebraska to Seward (just West of Lincoln) where we spent the night. On Sunday morning we stopped at a cute coffee shop in Lincoln and then continued all the way across Iowa to Dubuque, on the Mississippi River.
We spent a lovely week in Longmont, CO. During the days, Meg took advantage of a nearby running / walking trail, made the 25 min drive to downtown Boulder to wander the shops, and worked on a jigsaw puzzle. In the afternoons after Matt finished work we visited a couple local breweries to take advantage of the last of the decent outdoor weather. Left Hand Brewing Company and Wibby Brewing both had large outdoor patios, including a very enjoyable gas fire pit at Left Hand. On Wednesday Matt took a vacation day and we went hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park, about 45 min away. The mountains were beautiful, and luckily a very smart park ranger recommended that we might want spikes for our hiking. We saw a lot of wildlife throughout the day: Steller’s Jays, Wild Turkeys, Antelope, Deer, and a Big Horn Sheep. After hiking, we drove to Fort Collins for a well-deserved outdoor dinner at Old Elk Distillery (we might have been sitting outside in our full winter coats) and a quick stop at Crooked Stave.
When Matt finished work on Friday, we loaded the car and drove 182 miles to Tahoe Vista, CA on the Northern edge of Lake Tahoe, just minutes from the Nevada border. We saw our first snow of the season dusting the shoulders, but the road itself was clear. We arrived after dark to our cozy little cabin and awoke at sunrise on Saturday to a beautiful view of Lake Tahoe. After a quick walk along the shore, we grabbed a coffee shop breakfast and started our 7.5 hour (570 mile) journey, stopping at the Bonneville Salt Flats before continuing on to Salt Lake City, where we stayed overnight with John and Jen. Sunday was another long driving day (500 miles) across Southern Wyoming to Longmont, CO.
We celebrated the end of Meg’s work on ‘Wicked Bodies’ with our dear friends Tim and James who live just over the bay in Walnut Creek. They hosted us for the week and fed us well, introducing us to soup dumplings and feeding us delicious home cooked meals too! We “treated” their neighborhood trick-or-treaters on Halloween, took an afternoon to visit the Marin Headlands, and played many board games. It was a well deserved week of rest for Meg, and truly a joy to get to spend time with our west coast friends!
