Here we are in Colorado for the Holidays, but more importantly Nick's birthday. With a full house here at my Aunt's house, I surprised Nick with a quick little getaway. Yesterday we first headed to Black Hawk which is a small little city in Colorado about 1 hour 1/2 away in the mountains, an old mining town turned into a casino town. There are these little casinos (little compared with Las Vegas). It's like the wild west, saloons and all..sort of. I think we were the youngest of anyone playing at the casinos by at least 30 years. And since it was Nick's birthday, it was guaranteed we would win, right? Well, we did walk out up about $50 so we couldn't complain. Although we probably could've won more at our favorite slot machine if we weren't getting harassed by the mullet lady who continued to come over to us and say something each time we got the bonus....she was playing the same exact machine on the other side, but obvsiously wasn't winning at all.



After our quick little win, we headed to Boulder through the mountains where we checked into the very cute Boulder Bradley Inn. Thankfully the sky was blue and there was very little snow, so in our small little front wheel drive, we had no problem. The Bradley Inn is a bed and breakfast right near Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, a great place to stay if you are ever in the area. There was a wine and cheese hour we enjoyed and the breakfast was tasty with homemade granola, bread and a quiche.



For Nick's birthday dinner we went to a Japanese restaurant as if he can't get enough when he is in Japan. Although, really, it is nice to go to Japanese restaurants here in the US as we can order things we don't usually get in Japan because we don't know what they are and here everything is in English. The food was great and it was actually owned and run by Japanese, which is rare...really. Usually you'll find Japanese Restaurants or sushi bars run by Chinese or Korean which isn't always bad, but not authentic.

We couldn't finish off the night without dessert and that included Oreo chee secake from The Cheesecake Factory...yum.

This morning we got up early and headed to Eldora Mountain outside of Boulder to snowboard. It's the closest resort and usually the least busy. It doesn't even compare to the likes of Vail or Aspen, but it's one of the more affordableone and we got a great deal with this Boulder Ski and Stay escape.

Unfortunately, snowboarding today was like a tease...and we can't wait to get out to one of the bigger mountains. It's not that it was really small, etc. We were just pretty unlucky with the weather today. It was a gorgeous day except the wind! We made two runs early this morning on some of the more difficult runs and then they closed the lifts because they were clocking in 60 mph wind gusts at the top! Bummer! They closed all these lifts and left 3 green (easy) open to ride. So we did these for a while and then wind continued to pick up, it was harsh. There was only so many green runs we could do, especially when we spending more time on the lifts trying to block the wind then on the slopes. We left around 1, but are looking forward to doing some more before Nick leaves on the 4th.

Here's a video of me snowboarding. It's really not the exciting..watching me, but I do think Nick is did an excellent job recording me as I rode down the run.