Texans in the High Country

My sisters Kim and Karol live about a thousand miles from here, out where the horizon is a straight line and the biggest hill is an overpass. Every so often they point themselves at Colorado and we make a week of it. This October, the whole crew got the full tour: Steamboat, a mountain-pass road day, and the back patio.

Steamboat Springs

The Steamboat leg was the full crew: me, Shawna, Rebekah, Kim, and Karol, packed into a vacation rental for four days.

Friday after lunch we loaded up for the three-hour run to Steamboat.

The headline outing was the gondola: we grabbed day passes, rode up to the patio area, and posted up with drinks and food while the fall colors did their thing all around us. That’s the thing about bringing flatlanders up in October. They’ve seen trees change color before, but they’ve never seen an entire mountainside do it at once.

Back at the Airbnb, the sisters took over the kitchen. Mainly them, not me, which was exactly the right division of labor. And downtown Steamboat got the full shopping treatment. Rebekah, especially, shopped like she’d been saving up for it.

Then there was Strawberry Hot Springs. I’m underselling it by listing it second. Saturday afternoon, all five of us. You drive out of town and up into the hills, then soak in natural hot pools while the October air nips at everything above the waterline and the whole valley shows off its fall color. It’s the kind of place that makes Texans go quiet for a minute. Nobody wanted to get out.

Our last night in Steamboat came with bonus entertainment: dinner near the Yampa River, where a raccoon wandered up begging for food, tried to climb into my lap, and licked my leg (I was in shorts). There’s a picture. The raccoon was bolder than most of the tourists.

Breckenridge to Lake George

Monday was the siblings-only road day. Just me, Kim, and Karol. We took the scenic route out of Steamboat toward Breckenridge, because if your sisters only get one mountain-town Monday, it should involve shopping and lunch.

Lunch was at the Horseshoe in Breck. I was focused on the food. The kitchen staff took pity on me or liked me or both, and made up their own custom hot dipping sauce on the spot. It was amazing. The tragedy of the trip: I couldn’t take any home with me.

From Breck we went over Hoosier Pass, rolled through Alma and Fairplay for a quick look-see, then finished at the Lake George property so they could see the land.

Flatlanders and 9,000 feet of elevation are a combination that never gets old. Everything is “wait, people just LIVE up here?”

Castle Rock

Back in Castle Rock, we did what the end of a trip like this calls for: relaxed, took it easy, and finished the couch pictures. We have four couches in this house, one of them outside, and somewhere along the week it became a running joke to get a picture on every single one. The fourth couch picture completed the set.

We closed the week with a full-family game of Would You Rather, which is the right game for a group that hasn’t all been in the same room in too long. You learn things. Some of them you can’t unlearn.

A thousand miles is a lot of distance, and a week goes fast. But the formula works: put Texans on a gondola, feed them, drive them over a mountain pass, and finish on the patio couch. Kim and Karol head home with full cameras and we’ll start planning the next one.

Four couches, four pictures. The set is complete.