Breakfasts one and two: Quick 1 min oatmeal with brown sugar. Green tea.

Lunch one: Bagels and cream cheese, beef jerky, home mixed trail mix (cashews, honey roasted peanuts, banana chips, m&ms, yogurt covered raisins), fresh oranges

Dinner one: 2 cups instant rice, 1 can cream of celery soup, 1 can cream of chicken soup, 1 large foil packet of precooked/diced chicken- all mixed together and heated through and a little later the boys also made instant 4 cheese potatoes, instant gravy, and another packet of chicken. 

Lunch two: Hard salami, pepperjack cheese, wheat thins, and bacon cheddar squeezy cheese from a can. Fresh oranges, velveeta shells and cheese, and more trail mix.

Dinner two: McCormick Zesty Italian Marinara sauce packet (add a can of tomato paste), whole wheat noodles, whole grain artisan bread- warmed on a rock by the fire.

Snacks throughout the trip (and breakfast three): Various flavored granola bars, trail mix, fresh apples and oranges, s’mores, kettlecorn, hot chocolate, propel flavor packets for water, and a few other things I can’t remember right now. 

The food was a bit heavy but oh so delicious and worth every pound carried.  We ate a good portion of it and didn’t come back with too many extras…  Now I’ll just need to find a few new meal ideas for the next trip!!!

This Peru trip is for our 5 year anniversary!  We will be gone 13 nights.  2 of those nights will be spent on overnight flights and the remaining 11 of the nights will be spent throughout Peru including: Lima, Cusco, Sacred Valley, Pisac, Aguas Calientes, and Machu Picchu. 

We are going to Peru people   The smile on my face right now is a mile wide!!!

Nathan. He will be eating them in Peru this December! (I will not.) He called me today, quite excited, after I had sent him a link on the guinea pig delicacy of Peru.

WHY? didn’t I book it??? Because I’m an idiot, that’s why. For some reason I thought the airfare would still be that low later that night after I’d talked to Nathan about it.

An hour later the cheapest airfare was $700. I am a dork.

Oh well, it probably would not have been the best financial decision at this time anyway and once we got there we wouldn’t have had a ton of $ to spend…

I will continue my search for a cheap trip to San Francisco instead

Thursday we landed around 2:30pm and picked up our Dodge Charger rental car and headed into the mountains on up to Silverthorne. Got to Julie and Adam’s around 5pm. Julie was ready and waiting and helped us bring our bags in. We got ready and headed up to Dillon (5 min away) to go to Snowboarders (and skiers) for Christ aka SFC. They meet every Thursday and serve a free dinner (we had delicious taco’s that night) and then everyone gathers on one of the many couches for worship and a message. It was a really great time and good to meet some of the peeps in the Stromwall’s lives.

Friday we got up early and headed out to Loveland! We packed our own lunches (nummy hoagie sandwiches, chips, fruit bars, juice boxes, and chewy chips ahoy) to save tons of $’s. An average lunch for one person at one of the resorts is around $15-20. Julie and Adam had waited in line for 3hrs on Thanksgiving evening to get us free lift tickets to Loveland. It was very much appreciated and saved us over $100!!!

Loveland was amazing. Fresh powder covered a lot of the mountain. We took the highest lift they had up to the top of one of the mountains and hiked along the ridgeline and dropped into a big fluffy bowl of powder! It was amazing and super deep, this is where the video was taken of Nathan’s fall. When dropping in we had to watch out for the cornices of snow so we didn’t start an avalanche, that thought was kind of scary!!!

We boarded 4.5hrs at Loveland and then headed back to Julie’s. We picked up some chinese and a bit of liquor. We had heard all day that you get buzzed pretty quickly up in the mountains because your blood is thinner. So true!!! After 2 light drinks with my very heavy dinner I was super buzzed…

Saturday we headed to Beaver Creek, a 40 min drive. Beaver Creek is amazing for just riding. Julie doesn’t really like their park. But the riding was great. We had a lot of fun. Would have liked to do more tree riding but the powder in the forests was kind of rutted out and not so great, so tree riding was minimal. After boarding we headed back to Julie’s and chilled for a bit before heading out to dinner. All the restaurant’s were pretty packed with a long wait (except for Ruby Tuesday’s- but it smelled nasty in there so we skipped it) so we headed to Noodles for some nummy pasta’s.

Saturday night Julie got us started watching the tv show Weeds. It’s a pretty funny show that’s pretty entertaining. Part of me would like to take up watching more of it (we watched around 6 episodes while at their house) but the other part of me realizes I don’t have much extra TV time right now. Guess we’ll see…

Sunday was Breckenridge!!! We really enjoyed our time here despite my injury. One of the first things we did was take the Imperial Lift up to the top of Peak 8. After taking our picture with the sign (this lift is the tallest lift in North America) we hiked 200ft up to the summit to take the Lake Chutes run down. Once on top we boarded down the ridgeline and dropped into a bowl. We got down the steepest part and started riding through a gorge, the sides were rocky gravelly stuff, the middle was 5ft of powder. I accidentally rode up onto the side and ending up plowing the rocky hillside with my hip. I now have a pretty nasty cut on my elbow and an 8inch long bruise on my hip that is still very tender and painful. I screamed so much when I fell that Nathan, in his hurry to remove his board and get to me, accidentally dropped his board and Julie had to chase it 5 minutes down the mountain (a 10 minute walk for us to get back to her). YAY Julie for catching his board, it would have been a long hike down otherwise…

Anywho, after my fall we continued boarding for another couple hours. I just had to be careful to not fall on my hip again otherwise I would have been wishing for amputation I’m sure, lol…

We left Breck around 3pm and headed to Eric’s downstairs bar and grill. They were just starting to seat for the Superbowl so it was pretty busy. Julie introduced us to their amazing pizza with honey mustard on the side, so delicious!!!

It was back to Julie’s after that to await the arrival of Adam!!! He had spent the previous 3 weeks on a trip across the country snowboarding throughout the US. He had some awesome pictures and quite clearly had an amazing time. He got in around 10pm. Julie was so excited to see him!

Monday morning we got up and ready to head back to Denver for our 1:15pm flight.

To Julie and Adam~
Thank you for your amazing hospitality and the free Loveland tickets and half price (more than half price actually) lift tickets. You guys are awesome for continually making it possible for us to have a snowboarding vacation in the mountains! We enjoyed our time with you both and look forward to it again in the future!!!

Love,
Amy and Nathan

Me having a great little crash after hitting about 6″ of powder at Loveland Ski Area.

2006 Together:
Riviera Maya, MX
Lutsen

2007:
Together:
Eastern Caribbean Cruise: St. Thomas, St. Maarten, Bahamas, Miami, Kentucky
Nathan: Chicago (work)
Amy: Florida (work)

2008:
Southern California
Lutsen
MN Camping
South Dakota Black Hills Camping
Las Vegas
Kentucky
Amy: Florida, Chicago

2009:
Together:
Colorado
Cabo, MX
Las Vegas
MN camping
MN North Shore Backpacking Trip
Nathan: Miami, India and L.A. (work), California road trip home with Kevin
Amy: NYC

2010:
Puerto Rico
Colorado

Plan for rest of 2010:
India- if Nathan is sent again I will be going with or meeting him out there!!!
Peru- December/January 5-year anniversary trip

• It appears as though YouTube demolished the clarity & quality of this video.
• Disregard Amy’s nut comment regarding those we love getting the delicious candied almonds. It is unlikely more than a couple people will get them as Amy is loving them so much she is eating most of them.
• El Yunque is a rainforest. A rainforest is classified by 100″+ inches of annual rainfall. El Yunque gets about 20X” of rainfall annually.

  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rain+forest

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Yunque_National_Forest

• Yes, Lost is just a TV show…but seriously we found The Hatch.
• The Beef empanadas where delicious too.
• There is video from the Bioluminescent bay, but you cannot see a thing. In fact what you can hear Amy and I saying actually sounds kind of disturbing without video.
• A Flip Video Ultra HD is worth every penny for traveling.

Here is a video of us as we are wrapping up our trip out to Gilligan’s Island: