The Broncos Game...

A la my two week vacation from work, I've taken a bit of a siesta on the blog recently. In lieu of this, I've decided to play a little bit of catch-up on some happenings of the last few weeks. The first, that I will tackle today, is that Sarah and I made it to our first NFL game a few weeks ago -- the Denver Broncos versus the Baltimore Ravens.

Outside of Invesco Stadium
We got great seats from one my co-workers who has season tickets -- very close although they were off to the side of the endzone. We had a great view when the action was near our endzone, but we basically had to watch the jumbo-tron to see what was going on toward the other end of the field.

Close up Action Near Our Seats

It was a lot of fun and we liked the stadium, but the game itself turned into a defensive struggle (This ESPN headline pretty much sums it up: Flat Broncos manage narrow win vs. hapless Ravens). The Broncos won 12-10, but they never made it past the 40 yard line on our side of the field. Our best view was of a "what-the-hell-are-you-thinking" interception thrown by Ravens QB Kyle Boller in our corner of the endzone (I personally felt that I could have ran on the field and caught the ball before any Raven's WRs could get there).

Although Sarah and I certainly support the Broncos, they still come in second compared to our loyalties to the old hogs, the Washington Redskins (finally a playoff team again today).

More Skiing...

The freakishly tall adventures (on skis) have continued in full force. I think the old cliche "the third times the charm" holds true in Sarah and I's skiing trips. After our initial trip to Keystone (with the giant moguls), we hit Breckenridge the week after Thanksgiving. It was a powder day, which presents quite the duality for us. On one hand powder is cool to ski in, on the other we don't have powder skis and we still haven't quite grasped the subtleties of powder skiing (i.e., we suck at powder). It also meant that the road conditions were not perfect from the heavy snow the night before; however, the Puma (thank Bruce for the nickname), was more than enough machine to handle the snowy conditions. Breckenridge is always nice, but not everything was quite open yet so I didn't get that green slope to warm up on, plus I had boots misadjusted for the first few runs and the powder made all the slopes pretty choppy. We had fun, but certainly not our best day.
A little over cast at Breck
Trip #3, on the other hand, went a lot smoother. We decided to hit up Arapahoe Basin (or A-basin if you're a local like me), and although its the smallest of the mountains on our pass, it only has 69 trails, we had a great time. We found a lot of trails we liked and there was more than enough variety to keep us interested. The trails were mainly packed-powder, but you could also go off trail in a few places to practice powder skiing. We didn't attempt the moguls again this time, but we're getting closer to building up our confidence again.
Clear Blue Skies at A-Basin
It was a gorgeous day, and really the only negative was the 4:00pm skiing traffic. I had some horrible flashbacks to rush hour on 66 in DC, as we averaged about 10 mph for 40 miles of highway traffic. The trip to A-basin took just under 2 hours, the trip back took just under 3 hours.


Next up on the ski horizon is Vail...watch out Vail you're on Notice!

Giving Thanks...

Due to the recent holiday, I missed blogging last week; watch out though because I'm coming back full force this week (hopefully). Sarah and I made another trip back home to Virginia to play another game of how much family time can we squeeze into one four-day weekend. Here's a quick breakdown of our iteneriary:

Thursday
1) Get up at 4:00 AM - Thanksgiving Day
2) Catch 7:00 AM flight to Dallas
3) Eat traditional Thanksgiving meal at Airport Chilis
4) Fly to Reagan National, arrive at 3:30 PM
5) Eat Thanksgiving dinner #1 at Nate's house (Sarah's sister, Dawn's boyfriend) with the Wyses.

Friday
6) Drive to Richmond to my brother's house that morning
7) Meet Caroline Rebekah Diehl, our first niece
8) Eat Thanksgiving dinner #2 with the Diehls

Saturady
9) Christmas shopping
11) Watch UVA come painfully close to beating Miami
12) Drive back to Nova

Sunday
13) Fly back to Dallas - sitting through 45 minutes of turbulenance
14) Land on what we're not sure was a real runway (Sarah's comment: Why are we landing this way, when all the runways go that way)
15) Finally make it back to Denver late that night

It actually was a pretty good trip despite all the traveling. But now we're back to good old Denver where the high temperature tomorrow is going to be 4. That's right, the high is going to be 4 degrees. At least the skiing is good...