Country Road

View from the deck with the Christmas reindeer

Nice windows. :-)

The Stevens men. 3 Generations.

Colin and Annie sitting on a rock a their short and very sweet
meditation ceremony.

Beer on the rock at the meditation ceremony.
Miles climbing on Zan's back.

Proud papa of the groom.

Zan and Izzy quiet for 5 minutes.

Landon at the ceremony. 

Sunday morning in the kitchen. Prepping for 16.

Some of the brunch food.

Collin and Annie at the brunch party.

Collin in the hot tub.

We arrived in Denver at noon on Friday. Zan and Izzy were waiting for us, having flown in from NY and Charleston. Off to Fox Rental to pick up our mistake of a car headed into the reality show known as Boulder to the Whole Foods (been told the highest producing store in the country) to load up for the weekend in the mountains. It took two carts. We used one our belts to tie ourselves to one another - sort of like the tethers you see on a 3-year old - because the store was so outlandishly gargantuan, that I was certain it would take a weekend to locate each other should we part. This small town of a store has a bakery, a pizza shop, a coffee shop, a cheese shop, of course a deli, a small bookstore and home goods department, a sandwich shop and a massage parlor. Only in Boulder.

A quick stop on Pearl Street at the never-to-be-missed Boulder Book Store, which has to be one of the best independent book stores in the country and, as crowded it was, one might never even imagine the Kindle had been invented. It was overflowing with readers and buyers of books.

Hippies abounded. At an outdoor table over lunch, it was like a fashion show of the Boulder types passing by on the sidewalk. Lots of Beehive dreads, plenty of hip-hugging bellbottoms (omg - they looked exactly like what I wore in 1971), a woman looking like a belly dancer, aging guitar players, street people with lots of army green and a rotweiller sleeping on the street, an abundance of fringe especially on bags and more than the average quantities of lycra.

As you might imagine, Denver and Boulder are not at the top of my list for a vacation, so you will not be surprised that the purpose of the weekend was to celebrate Lee's oldest son, Collin's wedding to Annie, our prize of a new daughter in law. They were already married (eloped! LOVE IT!) so that they could apply as a married couple to the Peace Corps. So this was simply a weekend long party in honor of the blessed event.

We rented a "cabin" (again, most of you know a limestone townhouse on the Upper East Side or a Renaissance palazzo in Florence make me swoon. I'm not a cabin kind of gal.) But, it slept 10, which we needed, had the fundamentally important hot tub and a kitchen big enough for Izzy and I to set up the mess tent.

What we didn't understand was that to get to it, one needed a 4-wheel drive truck and the map that might have been useful to Lewis and Clark (had they been lucky enough to HAVE a map rather than create one.) The road was rutted, dirt , full of boulders and without markings. With the intermittent help of someone's cell phone we found the place. Suffice it to say, the place would have a stellar chance of winning a spot on Cabin Makeovers.

The wedding celebration was lovely at a park up on Sugarloaf Mountain, pot luck, beer keg and Oregon wine in plastic bottles (actually, a pretty cool green idea!) Then, it was cook cook cook for hundreds (or was it 20?) for dinner and breakfast and brunch. Isabelle was a slave and a saint. She did the MOST amazing job of cooking - she was a star. I was her lowly sous chef. Chop chop! ("Mom, PLEASE mince the garlic. That is chopped.")

Brunch today really was for something like 15. We cleared out the frig - handed out the leftovers for the taking and starting cleaning, doing laundry, scrubbing floors, recycling. Will it never end?

Finally, people departed one by one down the rutted dirt country road. I got a little teary watching Collin and Annie drive away.  They are off to conquer some world I have never known- backpacking the Italian Dolomites for their honeymoon (castle to castle - not so slummin' it) then to India and Nepal. After that...off to the Peace Corps sometime 2013. God Bless "Em.

Collin and Annie, the newlyweds.