The first thing you see when you approach the Aurora Fox Arts Center is their gorgeous, 61-foot marquee from the 1940s. Dan and I had a chance to visit this lovely theatre for a matinee performance of Larry Paar’s Hi-Hat Hattie. The ~250-seat venue has maintained many beautiful details of its history as a movie […]
Read MoreLory State Park
Lory State Park, about 8 miles from home, checked a major box for me: a place where I can hike while Dan can mountain bike. We have found many places that are good for one or the other, but Lory fits the bill. On this sunny, warm Saturday, Dan and I took a 4-mile hike […]
Read MoreFirst First Friday
The first Friday of the month is a gallery walk in downtown Fort Collins. We visited the Otter Shop again — hi Sean! — where they were selling small works by artist Jon Guendrum. I fell in love with a tiny turtle, which we brought home — only to realize that we already own a […]
Read MoreGinger and Baker and Wolverine. And camel. (But not pig.)
Hey, a restaurant that’s newer to town than I am! Ginger and Baker has only been open a week or so. It’s an enormous complex with two restaurants, a pie and coffee shop, a cutesy gift shop, and a training kitchen. If the photos below look as though they were taken at different times of […]
Read MoreNorth Shields Ponds
Every time I drive down Shields Street, I see a sign with two happy-looking turtles on it. Today I came home full of pent-up energy and asked Dan if we could check out the turtle sign behind our house. After some decoding — any conversation between Dan and me requires a little bit of translation […]
Read MoreBas Bleu Theatre: Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
Before we settled on Fort Collins, Dan and I visited a handful of other neighborhoods across Colorado to see if they might be a fit for us. Often the towns would offer stunning mountain views, breweries galore… and more than an hour’s drive to anything resembling theater. In “FoCo,” Dan and I can drive a […]
Read MoreTwitter Day
About a decade ago, I made a handful of really great friends through Twitter. (Dan was one of those people, actually!) This weekend a pair of those friends were nearby — Lindsay and Tim were visiting Lindsay’s family in Denver for Thanksgiving. Dan and I met them in Golden, at a brewery where Lindsay’s brother’s […]
Read MoreScouting Soapstone Prairie
For Black Friday we scouted out Soapstone Prairie to see if it would be suitable for future mountain biking (…on Dan’s part). Soapstone is about 40 minutes north of our house, still within the city of Fort Collins and stretching almost to the Wyoming border. It. was so. windy. Whatever you’re imagining, triple it. (Unless […]
Read MoreEagles and turkeys
Our Thanksgiving began with a sleeping pill. Neither Dan nor I had been sleeping well, and our Thursday morning plans fell through (feel better, Justin!), so we crashed hard the night before with the help of some Unisom. Eventually we did drag ourselves out of the house to visit Eagle’s Nest. We had the trail […]
Read MoreDraplin Design Co.
One of the important things Dan and I have in common is that we are both curious people. We actively look for ways to broaden our horizons, and very rarely do I suggest we attend/visit/explore something that Dan turns his nose up at. I would say we are both hobby designers. Dan actually has a […]
Read More