How's Your Aspen?

Last weekend we celebrated our first anniversary...it's hard to believe that it's already been a year! To celebrate we went to Aspen for the weekend. (Sorry for the title of this post, but we had to! We say that saying everywhere while we were there.) When we arrived on Friday we explored Aspen and checked out all of the shops. We also went to the John Denver tribute. I'll be honest and say that I have never listened to him, but Brandon was excited about it. And, of course, we watched the Olympic Opening Ceremony.

Brandon has been singing this song
since we got here.

On Saturday we went for a hike on Conundrum Trail. Brandon researched it and found out that there is a natural hot spring up in the mountains. What I didn't realize until we started the hike was that it was a 17 mile hike round-trip. It was definitely worth it, but I thought I was going to die during it. We have pictures to prove it. The view from the hot spring was beautiful. The company was also very entertaining. The biggest surprise came when a guy stood up to leave and we discovered that he was completely naked. I guess that's just something we need to get used to now that we're living in Colorado.

Just beginning our hike.

Like I said, just beginning our hike...

How I felt about 4 hours later...

One of the rivers we had to cross on our way to the hot spring.

We made it!

We brought a picture from our wedding with us.
Each year on our anniversary we'll hold a
picture of us from the year before so that we
remember what we do each year!

 On our way back from the hot spring we renewed our vows to each other, which was very special. It also rained for the last two hours of our hike. Luckily, we had purchased ponchos the night before. Although it was obvious that we're new to the whole hiking/Colorado lifestyle, we stayed dry!

Thank goodness for ponchos!

Hiking back in the rain...

It got really muddy!

We saw a double rainbow on our drive home!

School starts for me in about a week, so check back around then for pictures of my classroom. It's all coming together! I can't believe that I'm meeting my students one week from today! So far I have 28 students in my class, so this should be interesting!

Ilissa