Breckenridge

We were planning on going to Vernal, UT this weekend to visit Don's sister, Christine, who teaches 1st grade there and we were really looking forward to it.  Early on in the week, though, we saw that the weather was going to be terrible and we would never make it there in our little Honda.

I had a horrendous week at work and was really looking forward to seeing Christine and having a break, so I was pretty bummed.  One of my friends at work was going to take his wife to Frisco for the weekend to ski and celebrate her birthday, but she was coming down with a cold so they weren't going to go.  He offered to let me and Don have their two room nights, so we got excited about having a weekend in the snow.  Even though we couldn't drive through the snowstorm to Vernal, we could go to the mountains and make the best of the new snow. Although I can't downhill ski or really cross country ski anymore (I tried - I'm way too unstable now that my center of gravity has changed.  Well, let's be honest - I've never been stable on cross country skis.  Falling down is half the fun), I can still snowshoe! Don bought me some snowshoes for Christmas and I've been dying to go, so this was the perfect opportunity!

On Friday morning, my friend from work let me know that his wife felt better so they were going to Frisco after all.  Don and I had gotten way too excited about the prospect of hanging out in the mountains for the weekend, so we rashly decided to book ourselves a hotel in Frisco anyway.

We drove up Friday afternoon in a crazy snowstorm and went and took a look at the outlets in Silverthorne.  The snow began to really come down so we grabbed some burritos and rushed to Frisco.  Our car doesn't have great tires for the snow so we bought some cables so we could make it around without killing ourselves.  I knew it was a bad sign when everyone else on the road was driving a truck or SUV of some kind. We made it to the hotel safely and on Saturday morning, we started out to Breckenridge.

We went snowshoeing for a few hours in the beautiful powder, then headed over to the snow sculpture festival.  This is an international event and teams from all over the world come and carve sculptures out of huge 10'x10' blocks of snow. Don had been telling me he wanted to take me so it worked out nicely that it happened to be this weekend.

After looking at the sculptures, we had a nice dinner at a fancy little pizza parlor and headed back to the hotel for the night.  Now that I'm nearly 6 months pregnant, a hot bath is becoming one of my favorite things.  It is amazing how much more tiring snowshoeing is when you're carrying a little person along with you!  

This is Breckenridge.  It is a very charming town.  Mom - you'd love the street lights.

A snow sculpture depicting an owl in his home in a tree that several beavers are chopping down.

I had to take a little break. Going through this much fresh powder gets really tiring!

One of the views from the trail. 

Don running down a huge hill of untouched snow.