Our Denver Trip

Since this is Rob's last week of vacation before he has to return to work as a college instructor this fall, we decided we'd take a trip to the closest big city- Denver.  After about a 4 hour drive we arrived at the hotel, or "rotel" as Cora calls it.  When we were checking in, Finn looked around and said "This is AMAZING Dad!"  He's easily impressed I guess.  So funny.

We spent some time in the pool.  Cora dunked her head under the water for the first time and fearless Finn jumped off the side of the pool into our arms several times.

 I went over to the temple that evening which was really nice since we haven't been since our last trip to Oregon.  The temple was really busy since they are closing next week for renovations and everyone was trying to go before that.  I didn't get home until 10:30 at night.

The kids slept horribly that night in their new environment, as so we slept poorly too.  Rob walked around with Finn a lot to keep him from waking up everyone around us.

The next day we went to the Denver Zoo. 

Finn was excited about the Hyenas.  They're my favorite zoo animal too.

 Cora's almost too big for the stroller now, and she was nice enough to let Finn use it most of the day.

 

They had a small water play area at the zoo too, so the kids got wet and played for a few minutes.  Poor Cora walked around with wet shorts for the rest of the morning.  I had only brought a change of clothes for Finn, but they still had fun.

Here's Cora peeking out of the cave where you can view mongoose (mongeese?? mongooses??).

And here's her handsome daddy, stroller pusher and child wrangle extraordinaire.

Cora was very into reading the map.  In fact, on our way home from Denver today she was still looking at the map.  Several times on the way home she chastised us for missing the penguins.  We had to promise to see the penguins first next time we go.

We have some friends that moved to Denver recently, so we had arranged to meet them at the zoo, and I'm kicking myself now for not at least getting a picture of them all together.  Cora and Isabell used to go to nursery together.  Isabell also has a younger brother that's just a week apart in age from Finn.

After the zoo, Rob went to the temple while I paroused IKEA with the kids.  That store is crazy huge, and while most of the things there are not my style, they do have a few kids things that are really cute.

We ate at Red Robin, which we have been really missing since our move to Nebraska.

We drove home this morning.  As we were driving into town, I noticed a lot of the trees were missing all of their leaves over on the west side of town.  I even commented to Rob that it was strange looking over there- like winter.  The entire golf course on the west side of town looks like fall already happened.  When we pulled into our house, we could see the damage at our house too.  Apparently a huge hail storm came through the west side of town when we were gone.  It destroyed our beautiful sunflowers and our tomatoes (sadly the only 2 tomatoes that were growing are now lying unripened on the dirt).  The hail was baseball sized according to this article in the local paper.  It's worth looking at the article just to see how badly it destroyed the crates of watermelons outside the Walmart.  We're lucky it didn't break any windows.  Some people just a few blocks farther west had window broken and siding blown off.  We should probably climb up on the roof sometime soon to see if we are missing any shingles.

Now I'm sad I didn't take a picture of these sunflowers when they had all of their leaves and were looking impressive, for comparison.  I'm not sure they're going to survive now that most of their leaves are dangling from broken branches.  The hail was strong enough to bend one of my tomato cages in half!