Weekend warriors

This weekend, Mr. Dub's long, lost pal and his gal took us along for a little Colorado adventure. Our goal: To ride a 1.5-mile-long Alpine slide in Winter Park. (Of course, my goal thanks to my beautiful bump was to be a witness to said rides.) So off we set to the slide, which is about and hour and a half from our starting point ... in good traffic, that is.

Blame it on a softball tournament, holiday traffic or choir kids, but the moment we turned into the mountains, we hit bumper-to-bumper traffic. Around two hours later, traffic finally cleared up, but by then we were hungry and sick of sitting so we called it quits and stopped in scenic (touch of sarcasm) Idaho Springs. Apparently, so did everyone else, which is why traffic had improved. I think most of the those softball-singing-summer-trippers were eating at Beau Jo's with us. But that's OK because the pizza there is amazing: huge pizzas* with towering crusts that are meant to be eaten with honey when you get to the edge. Good stuff!

Once we had our fill of sweet and saucey and toured a random Irish shop full of Irish junk, we realized that we wouldn't make it to Winter Park before the slide closed. So we turned around, took a scenic back route and settled for a smaller Alpine slide in Golden. This one was part of a bizarre amusement park that sort of looked like Disneyland after an apocalypse ... or 20 years of disrepair. (I'm thinking the latter.) The rest of the crew braved stormy conditions and took the ski lift up and the slide down. Here's my man making his way to the finish line:


All in all, a great day even if most of it was spent in a car. (And even though my little gal isn't tall enough to ride the Alpine slide yet.)


*For those interested, Beau Jo's offers a challenge to the heartiest of eaters. Two people must consume 14 pounds of pizza (enough for about 15 people) loaded down with hamburger, sausage and pepperoni and embedded in a massive crust. (That's the hard part!) It costs $64.50 to attempt, but if you can do it, they'll foot your bill, give you $50 and 2 free T-shirts. However, we saw a wall of Polaroids documenting such attempts and not one group seemed to have accomplished it. But if you're hungry and in Colorado, you might want to give it a try!