scaqaboutwest: Eat More Beans

We've lost touch with our children. This is all they do. Ever. We actually took away Clash of Clans, since it required constant maintenance from Quinn, but installed Minecraft on our home computer in trade.

Quinn starts middle school tomorrow and Abbey has been in marching band camp for the last couple of weeks. So summer is over and it's only the middle of August. But that's no surprise, because there's really not much that goes on here that actually makes any sense.

For example, my parents came out and brought their oldest and youngest grandchildren. We rode our bikes to a flood control structure to play. We also went to the zoo, where we truly belong, and we rode a real Galloping Goose, although not at the zoo.

And we had a tornado a week before they came. Funnily enough, we'd had a woman from southern California out to my office for a job interview, and on our way out to lunch, she commented on the tornado shelters in the Denver airport. The idea of being in tornado country seemed to worry her. We assured her that it was very rare to for a twister to hit Denver. Later that afternoon, I took this picture out my office window while she was sequestered in one of those tornado shelters at the airport.

And while I'm on the subject of bad weather, I'll share a few pictures from a recent bike ride on the Bear Creek Trail, which starts in Lair o' the Bear Park just west of Denver. We like to do our trips to the mountains early in the day to avoid the classic afternoon thunderstorms -- of which we've had plenty this year. But last weekend Abbey was working an ice cream social at the zoo in the morning, so we picked her up at noon to go dodge lightning bolts in the mountains. It was really fun. And scary. Despite the weather, the park was packed when we arrived, so we had to park our truck quite a ways down the highway and ride up to the park. It was raining when we started; Quinn and I hid under a tree to get out the rain waiting for Cindy and Abbey to catch up and captured the photo below. We had split up when riding through the crowded path along the creek.

You don't have to go far to leave the crowds behind. There's something of an exponential decrease in the number of visitors with increasing distance up the trail. Usually we try to ride up this staircase in the photo below; I've come close, but never made that final turn. With damp rocks and wet, sandy tires, this was not a good day for riding up steep rocks.

Abbey just can't quit marching.

Who need's traction?

But when the lighting got really close, we turned around and headed down. So it was a short ride, but we were trying to squeeze it into a short window of time between the zoo and Quinn's evening Colorado Honor Band Concert. Quinn has a healthy fear of lightning, so it was a little hard to keep up with him once we made the decision to get off the mountain.