Under the Milky Way Tonight

We got home last night from a magnificent weekend in the mountains, with some old friends of ours. It's not so much that they're old, but that the friendship is old. Not in a bad way. In a very good way.

We've never gone away with D&M before and it was so much fun. M's parents are semi-housesitting for some friends who are out of the country. Every few weeks, someone goes down to south central Colorado to look in on the house and make sure everything is okay. D&M were going down this past weekend and invited us to join them.

The house sits on 35 acres in the Wet Mountains. It faces south/southwest with an amazingly breathtaking view of the western face of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. We'd only ever seen the east face of them before. "Gobstruck" was an understatement.

Once we turned off from Florence, Colorado we were mostly on dirt road and then we were exclusively on dirt road once we passed the ghost town of Rosita. It was another 20 minutes or so in, on windy one-lane dirt roads. Once we arrived, this is what we saw:


We spent the weekend staring off at this amazing view, walking, talking, eating, drinking, playing Uno, watching movies ("It's just like Santa's workshop! Except it smells like mushrooms and everyone looks like they wanna hurt me."), listening to coyotes howl (I thought they were sirens....), fixing the water filter so we could bathe, caulking, sleeping, reading, trying to keep up with a seven-year old boy and his six-month old puppy, and looking up at the stars. You've never seen so many stars in all your life. Out where we were, it was so dark that with all of the lights in the house off, we could actually see the Milky Way.

We take Colorado for granted and don't get away as much as we should. Traffic along the I-70 corridor is such a nightmare on weekends, but we forget there are other places to go--places that tourists rarely get to. Our weekend outside of Westcliffe was a little bit of heaven on earth and we both came home refreshed and relaxed.

Here are some pictures from our weekend--these are some of my favorites.