Much Needed Girl Time and Stuff

Tim and I highly value our respective "girl" and "guy" time.  We each take a couple weekends per year to get away and do something for our own guilt free sanity.  I spend a lot of my freebie weekends with my deary, Amy.  She lives in TX, so we rotate our visits.  She flew out last weekend and we ditched my Denver crew to hibernate in Vail.  It was bliss.  We ate, drank, sat by the pool, giggled like I hadn't giggled in months, hiked 3.5 miles, straight up (more on that at a later date) and chatted for hours and hours about everything and nothing at all.  We needed some good Amy-Gwen time.  Thanks for coming out friend.  

Amy took tons of pics on our deceivingly difficult hike, so I'll post some of those later with a more adequate explanation of the experience.  In the meantime, below is a hodgepodge of phone pics from the past month, worthy of being shared.  The first shots are from a trip up to Palisade I took with a crazy fun co-worker, Kaye.  We have a warehouse up there in dreamy Palisade, land of vineyard after vineyard and peach orchard after peach orchard.  We toured a peach processing plant, took tons of photos and videos, picked some fresher than fresh produce, drank some wine, bought some fun Palisadey farmers stand products, ate a delish dinner and relaxed.  Oh yeah...we worked too.  

 You just never know when you'll happen upon a giant plastic cow and a nudist colony.  

 The landscape up there is unbelievably stunning.  Like nothing I had seen along my treks up I70.  

Since my work partnered with Vail Cascade Hotel, I've been blessed to get up there for meetings.  Maria joined me for one of them.  We did all the same things Amy and I did during our beautious 24 hours away.  

These are two random, fun shots of my Dude in Chicago.  Mom V treated us to Dude's fanciest lunch to date.  They gave him ice cream to boot.  He thought he was hot shit in his high back leather chair.  Then we tracked down the funny statue man that dances like a robot for money.  Dude was absolutely entranced for 10 solid minutes until Dad drove by on Michigan Ave, forcing us to get in the car.  Chicago commuters aren't known for their patience.