HELLO

Hi. I'm Amanda...a happy wife and mom to three awesome guys. We've lived here in Fort Collins for more than 20 years and are proud to call it home. Before moving to CO, I worked at a city attorney's office, making use of my law and Master's degrees from Duke. After settling in Fort Collins, I homeschooled my three (now teenage and older) sons and was delighted to experience music classes, soccer, karate, swim team, archery, Science Olympiad, First Lego League, parkour, and climbing (not all at the same time!). From 2005-10, I was also a contributing editor for a national scrapbooking magazine, authoring a book and a couple of monthly columns. From 2009-10, I founded and ran the Good Grief Blog. I enjoy learning new things, spending time with my family, volunteering with The Matthews House, traveling and indoor rock climbing.

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« DCC 2015 - Part 1 | Main | Piedra Falls »
Saturday
May232015

Mesa Verde

On Thursday, we drove from Pagosa Springs over to Mesa Verde National Park for the day. It was pretty awesome. Despite grumbles about the drive, itself (there was some unexpected construction that caused delays on top of the two hour drive), everyone had a truly good time and came away from the experience happy.

We ate first then headed to Spruce Tree House to do the self-guided tour thing. On the walk down, Micah stopped to do some sketching...

(Since he's been pretty into drawing lately, I outfitted both him and Asher with travel sized sketch books for the trip.)

Micah and I then caught up with the rest down in Spruce Tree House...

After climbing down into the kiva and looking around and all, we headed back out...detouring a bit to hike part of a nearby trail. We turned around after this point, but not before Asher and Micah had great fun re-enacting the trash compactor scene from Star Wars, lol.

From Spruce Tree House (after wandering the museum there and watching a video), we drove a bit of the loop and stopped at the overlook for Cliff Palace (which, unfortunately, didn't open for the season until the next day)...

(The stuffed squirrel on Micah's shoulder is named Spruce. Micah picked him up at the giftshop at the Spruce Tree House and is very happy about it, lol.)

Then we continued on our way to Balcony House, where we took the guided tour. This was definitely the highlight of our visit. Nathan and I have been to Mesa Verde before but hadn't done a guided tour. It's worth it, folks! (I have lots of pictures and stories but am abbreviating them here...)

Here are Asher and Micah's butts climbing the tall ladder to get into Balcony House. (My apologies to the strangers on the ladder above them. I wasn't trying to photograph your behinds, lol.)

...and boys looking around in the living areas of Balcony House...

...and the tight little tunnel to get back out of Balcony House...

(That's Nathan.)

Our tour guide was really spectacular and made the experience so much better. You could tell he just absolutely loved his job, and he did a great job of sharing that love. Happy.

From there, we did a wee bit more driving and stopped at this overlook:

And then boys declared themselves done for the day and we headed out of the park to find dinner and drive back to Pagosa. A good day!

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