40th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION IN COLORADO

We had a wonderful time celebrating our 40th anniversary with all our children and their spouses and our 21 grandchildren in Colorful Colorado at the Spanish Peaks Lodge. Elisa's husband, John, was not able to go because he has a missions trip to the Philippines coming up this Saturday and could not take off any more work days. We rented 2 fifteen passenger vans and Roger drove his car(pulling a u-haul trailer for all the luggage and other necessities). It was a long drive but we thought all the children did great with being confined to car seats and vans all day.

Below you see the car lot that was in our back yard when we left Hutchinson. We are thankful that it did not rain much before we got back so we would not have trouble getting them out when we returned. I think there were 7 of them.

In the two pictures below, we are packing the vans up and the u-haul trailer. The trailer was just perfect with plenty of room and more.

Yes, Elisa is very pregnant and still has a month and a half to go but she did well - even hiking up to the meadow which took our group of 34 about 45 minutes.

Below you see a few of us sitting on the deck outside the main floor living area at the Lodge.

The two pictures below are of our group having devotions and the kids singing.

The cousins having fun at the Lodge.

On the second floor there was a little lounge area where the kids would hang out and do little projects or play games.

The guys enjoyed playing pool and the kids would play without the cue sticks and roll the balls back and forth. They also had a ping pong table down in the basement.

The pictures below were taken at the sand dunes. This place was fun for the kids but not baby friendly. As several climbed to the top of the sand dunes, the sand was blowing and it was not an easy climb. I believe Greg was the only one that made it to the top.

This picture of several of the little ones was taken in the van in the parking lot. That is where I spent most of my time with the van running to keep the babies(+) comfortable.(Molly, Ethan, Meryn, and Avery)

Below is our group resting as they hike to the meadow. They all did really well. We had a tree or two to climb over and we had to cross the stream a few times but we all made it to the meadow in good time. We had a short devotional time there and grandpa shared how he met their gramma.

The little ones would want to crawl up on our laps to rest.

Gramma was having with Ella and Brittany.

After reaching the meadow and carving our year of 2007 on our tree, we went over to the stream.

Below are the ones that are hiking up to the west peak and obviously they are just beginning their hike. There was a group of 9 that made it to the top. Some of them were pretty young to accomplish that.