Shared Birthdays

~Friday, October 30, 2020~

Day 138 (Travel Day)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY 🎂🍾🎁🎈 to the best birthday present I’ve ever had….my amazing daughter Hannah. It’s hard to believe my first born came into our lives 26 years ago and is now a mother of two herself. And she’s a wonderful mother! And I guess I’m allowed to say Happy Birthday to myself….right? I woke up to lovely online birthday greeting cards from my mom and my Aunt Linda and Uncle Jim from Cambria. Thank you so much you guys. I have much to be grateful for, especially being able to take this journey with my husband and best friend. We’re fortunate beyond words for the opportunity to do this thing.

Being my birthday, we didn’t plan that out very well having this be a travel day for us. But it is, what it is, and luckily we didn’t have too far of a drive. Colorado Springs to Fort Collins is about a 2-½ to 3 hour drive. We decided after all to go for it and head north since we really wanted to see Fort Collins, Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park before leaving Colorado. While I played passenger, updating our website and posts, Jeff had the stressful drive to Horsetooth Reservoir Campground (Southbay). I say stressful because there was a lot of traffic congestion, especially going through the Denver area, and miles of road construction with a lot of narrow lanes and windy turns. It looks like they’re widening miles of Highway 25 here. We had booked a reservation for a site right on the lake, but didn’t realize how low the reservoir would be. The Southbay area is completely void of water. Well, at least Sadie has the lakebed to run around in.

It’s a pull-through site which you’d think would make things easy, but was in fact, a bit tight with a few boulder and guard pole obstacles to work around. Since we try to mix things up a bit with full hook-ups, electric only, or dry camping, we decided to book an electric only site since we had just come off of 5 days of full hook-ups. We would be doing more dry camping if the weather wasn’t so cold, so having the bare minimum of electric hook-ups is necessary. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of parking the rig first, assuming there would be a fresh water spigot somewhere in the loop. Luckily, we hadn’t unhitched yet. Just after placing our trailer perfectly at the site, we had to get back in the car and drive over to the dump station to do our fresh water tank fill. Now…..let’s try this again.

Horsetooth is a beautiful campground, even without the lake right outside our door during this time of year. We can’t imagine how much more beautiful it would be if that were the case. I’d say the campground has about 10 RVer’s with only a few neighbors in sight. There’s a little bit of residual snow on the ground, and not a hint of smoke around. As you remember from my previous posts, the Cameron Peak Fire closed this campground a few weeks ago. I really don’t want to see the utter devastation this fire caused.

With us arriving late afternoon and having to set up and all, we decided to celebrate here tonight. Jeff had given me 3 options for my birthday…..go out, prepare a gourmet meal here, or just eat what’s in the fridge (hah, I don’t think so). My choice, have Jeff, being the amazing chef that he is, prepare a lovely meal tonight, and go out tomorrow night. He had already researched 5 restaurants in Fort Collins to choose from, so I chose The Cafe at Ginger and Baker. The food looks amazing, and the ambiance...superb! So 7:30 it is tomorrow night.

Even with more limited kitchen tools, Jeff made an amazing dinner and one of my favorites….Eggplant Parmesan, followed by apple turnovers garnished with 5 birthday candles.

We didn’t eat until 10:00 p.m. but it turned out perfect since it was birthday central here with phone calls from friends and loved ones. It is a bit sad that we all can’t be together to celebrate, so thank goodness for Facetime!