Jason and I throw a Christmas party every year. How many parties can one couple possibly host you ask? Regardless of the wisdom, for this couple that number is apparently a lot. Our holiday shindig usually involves a meal, white elephant gift exchange and the bearing of ugly Christmas sweaters and moustaches. This time, however, we decided to add another layer of seasonal wistfulness to the festivities.
The ugly sweaters and moustaches weren’t as bountiful at our party as I would have liked but, as you can see, foulness was present.
Just a cute picture of Lee and Suzan.
Jason and I opted to rent a cabin near the Sundance Resort for our get-together and the entire corresponding weekend. We invited about twenty friends to enjoy the restful beauty and holiday aura of this 4400 sq. ft. rustic hideaway surrounded by hillsides of thick forest dressed in white.
The white elephant presents at our party usually range from completely bizarre to not half bad.
This pool table was one of the reasons we picked this particular cabin.
For the party portion of this excursion we provided everything from soothing soup to cozy hot chocolate so that the lucky invited could warm and expand their innards as they chatted around a welcoming fire. There were lively games of pool and Dance Central following dinner but, for most, the evening was primarily spent simply enjoying the grub, company and nostalgic setting.
The cabin had walls of windows making one feel like part of the wintery setting.
We kept this massive fireplace ablaze most of the weekend.
Although everyone was invited to linger for the weekend, the bulk of our friends left late that night after the revelries. (Seriously people, you’re offered a free stay at a giant cabin and you don’t take advantage of it?) Adam, Abigail, Drew, Simone, Tom and Aimee all stuck around though for a couple days of serene relaxation. After the party-goers departed, we eight played Saboteur until the wee hours of the morning and awoke the next day to oversized flakes of snow peacefully drifting down around us as if we were in the middle of some traveler’s globe trinket. The flurries didn’t let up the entire day; about 22 inches fell within 24 hours. I guess someone kept shaking that watery orb.
In this case, “hot tub” might be a misnomer.
The sky was so dark during the storm that it was hard to tell where it ended and the ground began.
We all jumped in the patio’s hot tub that afternoon while fluffy powder silently built up on our heads and melted into tiny icicles in our hair. Honestly, it was a little magical. Later, after more gaming, we bundled up and walked down the buried mountain roads to eat dinner at Sundance’s Foundry Grill. It was a fun adventure and quite filling.
No, “cold” doesn’t quite cover it.
More board games were played, books read and stitches knitted that night and then, the next morning, the boys set about the laborious task of digging our frostily interred cars out so we could head home.
Those of us that stayed found much use for board games.
The storm left a winter wonderland behind when it finally cleared.
Our party and weekend were quite a success, if I do say so myself. Between the boisterous crackle of wood burning in an inviting fireplace, the glittering shavings of snow noiselessly floating down and the happy chatter of friends forgetting their to-dos, the holidays felt very close at hand in that comfy cabin.
Sick of the twenty-something temps that have put a freeze on Utah? Me too. That’s why I was extremely excited to leave them for Disneyland and a little 70+ bliss a couple of weeks ago.
The curves and loops of the Paradise Pier looked pretty dressed in the pink of a setting sun.
The character actors in Disneyland always do a terrific job.
I insisted on everyone riding the teacups even if they vomited.
Jason’s company graciously pays for all of their employees, and their families, to travel to Disneyland every December. The timing of that trip this year couldn’t have been better. As a snowstorm was dumping ten inches of powdery mayhem in Utah we were frolicking in shorts and t-shirts in nearly 80-degree weather. It was glorious!
My age has never stopped me from behaving juvenilely.
Lightning McQueen was sleek and amusing.
The Main Street tree is always enormously impressive.
Since Jason works with our friends Adam and Jeremy, their company’s Disneyland outing is typically accompanied by a lot of chuckling, screaming and strolling with buddies. We didn’t spend every second with our small gang of chums but we hung out with them plenty.
Flick was so thrilled to meet me his butt wiggled with excitement.
Christmas decorations pop up in random places in the park.
The Haunted Mansion gets a brilliant Nightmare Before Christmas transformation every year.
You’re never too old to be silly. Trust me.
I made it a point this time to sample as many of the tasty treats afforded by the park as possible. Surprisingly, there are some great food options available if you know where to look. I gobbled all things delicious including: hand-dipped ice cream bars, asparagus-bacon skewers, pineapple whips and hand-battered corndogs. (Yes, I made an exception to my no-hotdog policy.) Along with all that fabulous junk, Jason and I also took in the fancy fare at Napa Rose and the Blue Bayou. Although we consumed a lot of yum and then some, I believe the Blue Bayou provided our best meal experience. Nibbling spicy grub with my spicy man beneath the glow of abundant twinkle-lights suspended from a serene faux-sky was far more romantic than the setting’s fakeness might suggest.
Now that’s my kind of royalty!
Jason and I don’t need an epic setting as incentive to plant a smooch but having one never hurts.
The little kids were excited to meet a real princess.
A greasy turkey leg was Jeremy’s dearest Disneyland desire.
Disneyland is always impressive but Christmastime adds an extra layer of magic to the park. Between the enormous sparkling tree, the numerous glittering wreaths strung across Main Street, the occasional showering of bubble “snowflakes” and the nightly fizzing of Christmas fireworks, Disneyland is saturated with nostalgia during the holidays. We rode all of our favorite rides plus we took some time to appreciate the seasonal alterations to the Jingle Cruise, “it’s a small world” and the Haunted Mansion.
I love running across rope bridges as much as the next five-year-old.
The traverse climbing wall at the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail was trickier than it looked.
The Tower of Terror is definitely one of my favorite rides despite its tendency to make me feel queasy.
I like the goofy ones.
Disneyland in December, when the sunshine is warm, the food jolly and the decorations bright, might possibly deserve to be called the happiest place on earth.
Moab is one of my favorite places on planet Earth, well the entire Solar System really. Jason and I just made our biannual trip to its weather-sculpted plateaus and untouched deserts that feel a bit like home to us…a home with an infinite crawl space. We spent three days seeking out adventure in its unexplored routes and novel crevices. Seek and ye shall find fun, or so I hear.
The switchbacks descending into Mineral Bottom seemed never ending on the way down and a lot more never ending on the way back up.
The hype surrounding the White Rim Trail has always made Jason and me curious…and skeptical. This 100-mile-long 4WD road below the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park could possibly be the most popular scenic ride anywhere. Between the 4WDs, dirt bikes and mountain bikes, it apparently becomes a crammed freeway during peak season. Experiencing the marvels of “peaceful solitude” alongside throngs of people? No thanks. That’s why Jason and I thought we’d give this famous path a try while the nature-obsessed hordes were absent thanks to the nearness of winter. We only saw a couple of 4WDs and a handful of bikers our entire day on the rim. Hallelujah for November!
Jason took this picture of me from one switchback up. It looks like an aerial shot.
The White Rim Trail practically jumps into the Green River.
We accessed the White Rim via Mineral Bottom Road, hopping on our bikes right before this path plunges to the actual bottom of Mineral Bottom over a series of gnarly switchbacks. We sped past the remains of four or five cars that had probably dived over the side of this narrow thoroughfare many years ago. Unsettling. Once we finished our descent to the river, our journey became practically effortless. White Rim is neither technically challenging nor physically difficult, apart from the brutal climb necessary to emerge from its bottom. In fact, I would venture that it’s the easiest trail we’ve ever done in Moab.
The weather was pleasant in Moab but extra layers were necessary off and on. I got sick of pulling off and on my arm warmers so in a ridiculous halfway-state they stayed.
Was it worthy of all the hype? Not really. Towering plateaus with odd-shaped crowns encircled us and the Green River nonchalantly sprawled out at our feet surrounded by a halo of yellowing leaves but, as ideal as that setting sounds, the scenery was not any prettier than some we’ve witnessed at other less-acclaimed locations. With the seclusion we enjoyed that day, this ride was well worth it but would it be worth it in the presence of an endless caravan of tourists bent on experiencing the “wilderness”? Absolutely not. There are plenty of gorgeous places around Moab where you can enjoy nature’s exquisiteness without nature’s plague, AKA man.
This beautiful overlook on the Portal Trail marked the beginning of the ill-advised portion of the path.
Signs such as this were posted at several points on the Portal Trail.
Thanks to the time change, we only had enough daylight to bike a little over 20 miles of the White Rim but, with the 1000-foot ascent out of Mineral Bottom squished into a fraction of a mile, we got a hardy workout anyway.
Do you see a path in the middle of this cliff? No? There is one: the perilous Portal Trail.
Our second day in Moab is traditionally our hiking day. We give our sore butts a brief breather and use our feet for something besides pedaling. This time we packed our hiking day with not one but two adventures. First, we hit the infamous Portal Trail. Why is it infamous you ask? For starters, it’s one of the most dangerous trails in the world and has claimed the lives of three bikers. This route is a thousand feet up from the valley floor and right, and I mean right, on the edge of a 200-foot cliff. A three-foot ledge between the precipice above and the precipice below is all you’ve got to travel on and, believe me, it’s not much. It was scary enough just walking it, I can’t imagine the level of derangement necessary to consider biking it. The views of the Colorado River, too far below, were amazing but I found myself hugging the path while those precarious heights made me a little woozy. Beauty and terror: sounds more like your typical dating scene than a leisurely trip down a little portal.
False Kiva is tucked away in a hidden cave on the side of a rock face.
The area around Moab has so much geological diversity that the terrain looks completely different from one spot to the next.
After our 5-mile trek through the Portal of Death, Jason and I went on a different kind of adventure, the secret kind. False Kiva, so named because its origins are unknown, is a round stone structure built in a remote cave in the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park. Don’t bother looking for a trail to it on your park map, you won’t find one. While the 1.6-mile route to the kiva is pretty well-marked, the debate on whether to disclose the exact location of this archeological site has never been resolved and so it remains semi-concealed. We had a great time wandering the hush-hush path to this cave and photographing its cryptic kiva. Nothing makes something more fascinating than a secret.
These nameless precipices provided an excellent viewpoint from which to gawk at the Book Cliffs.
The ride to the Book Cliffs overlook crossed a steep tongue of slickrock.
Our last day in Moab we decided to divert from the beaten path even more than usual and take a little-known 4WD trail up to an obscure viewpoint overlooking the Book Cliffs. The Book Cliffs are the longest continuous escarpment in the world, traveling through a hundred miles of Utah and Colorado. The path we rode to “view” them was a little less than six miles total but it was so swathed in loose stones that it took us three hours to complete this outing. Although the panoramas of the Book Cliffs from the overlook were splendid, we found the unnamed precipices that the overlook itself was located on to be more interesting. We paused for an awesome snack break on their brink above Salt Valley’s beautiful desolation. What a nice, although rocky, little jaunt.
The “road” to the Book Cliffs overlook was as rocky as they come and very tricky to ride.
Moab, our favorite nature-made playground, again proved itself superior to any manufactured monkey-bars. We tired ourselves out pedaling its rimmed plateaus, discovered a few of its guarded secrets and witnessed some of its greatest dangers. It’s hard to cram that much intrigue into three days but somehow we managed.
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