One of the best starts to a new year that I've ever had

This past weekend, my boyfriend and I took a trip to Winter Park, Colorado.

We decided to try something new - we went tubing. Tubing, at least in Colorado, means that you pay someone to slide down their mountain on an inner tube. The place where we went allowed us to rent a tube for each of us (for an hourly fee) so we could go flying down the hill as fast as we pleased.

You might think that we got exercise by lugging the tubes back up the hill, but no. You'd be wrong. The hill that we went to took us back up on an escalator/people-mover type thing.

Being lazy was wonderful. :)

So basically the cycle went as follows:

1. Me commenting to the boyfriend about how cold it was.
2. Both of us blowing our noses in tissues.
3. Us going up the hill on the escalator.
4. Deciding which of the three segmented hills we wanted to risk our lives on.
5. Laying down on the inner tube either face first or on our butts, ready to go down the hill, holding hands.
6. Realizing that we were too far away from the edge of the hill to actually slide down.
7. Scooting and/or rocking our tubes back and forth to get them to the edge of the hill so we could slide down. This sometimes took more than a moment or two.
8. Me screaming down each hill - especially as we turned around so we couldn't see what was coming. He laughed at me every time.
9. Us getting up from our tubes (after they were safely stopped) with a groan because we are OLD.*

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

It was a fun time.

We had made arrangements to stay in Winter Park at a hotel that allowed dogs, so I brought Chassis along. Due to some misinformation, we ended up not staying at that hotel, and instead called a hotel down the road to see if they had occupancy.

The clerk told us that although they did have a room, they did not allow pets. We asked if she could recommend a hotel that did allow pets and that is when she relented and said that we could come with our dog on two conditions:
1. That we would never tell anyone that we brought a dog in (sort of like the first rule of Fight Club).
2. That if we were asked why we had a dog, we were to say that it was a service dog.

We assured her that our dog would sleep almost the whole time, that she wouldn't bark, and that no one would even know she was there.

Without further ado, we checked into the hotel and quickly ushered Chassis into the hotel room.

In the end, she barked a few times at the rowdy neighbors in the middle of the night, growled a few times at other noises, and only jumped on and off the spare bed a few times (which sounded like someone having a seizure and falling to the floor). She had to potty a few times (as would be expected) and earned a few "WHOA. That is a BIG dog!" from passersby, but that was basically it.



I mean, really. How could anyone notice that she was there??

And yes, that is a queen bed.


* We had to sign release forms before going tubing. On the release forms, one of the pieces of information that they asked for was our birth dates. The boyfriend? He filled out his stating that he was born in 1982...making him 5 years younger than me. So for the rest of the day, he kept saying that he was younger than me and calling me a cougar. For the record, this is SO NOT TRUE. Let the record state that he's 10 1/2 years older than me, thankyouverymuch.