Aspen Adventure

Yesterday I got snowed in-- in Aspen. I've been here 4 days now and it has been an adventure since the beginning.

I woke up to snow on the morning of my 27th birthday (last Saturday), and my sweet husband managed to get me to the airport with time to spare. I bid goodbye to him and our big furry child and caught my first flight into Denver. It was delayed over an hour because of snow and lack of de-icer. I spent 25 minutes on the phone changing my connecting flight because I was bound to miss it.

I enjoyed all the leg room that accompanies the emergency exit seat and when I arrived in Denver, I found that my connecting flight had been canceled. I located a co-worker who I was traveling with and she told me that she booked seats for us on a shuttle to Denver, which left at 12:30pm. So I had an hour and a half to get my bag and get on the road. No problem, right?

Wrong. I left Denver in a van with 11 other people and nothing but my purse and laptop bag. Captained by a red-headed Kiwi man, we trudged for 6 hours through the ice and snow and traffic until we finally made it to Aspen.

Aspen was ridiculous. We stayed in the Cold Stream Trout Lodge, which is an 8000 square foot log cabin on a little river/stream that's owned by the CEO of Barry-Wehmiller. (We also had dinner at his incredibly gorgeous barn on Saturday night.) The trout lodge featured a moose head over the giant fireplace and a bear rug on the floor. It snowed constantly. We had a chef who cooked us three meals a day, and most of them were made from healthy, organic, local ingredients. I went to a spa on Sunday and got an 80 minute massage. On Monday, we spent a full day talking about visioning and then went and had an incredible dinner together at a different ranch (peach margaritas with tiny chunks of fresh peach in them, wilted kale salad with currant, pine nuts and parmesean, melt-in-your-mouth peppercorn crusted beef tenderloin with cherry port reduction, garlic mashed potatoes and brocollini, chocolate mousse cake and raspberry vanilla cheesecake for dessert. Ridiculous.) and were then entertained for an hour by a bluegrass playing trio of older country gentleman who called themselves Timber Mill. Twirp, Cash & Randy played lots of John Denver songs and a little "Devil Went Down To Georgia", "Cotton-Eyed Joe" and one of the best versions of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" I've ever heard. I'm so sad I didn't get a recording of that one.

Anyway... there was dancing involved, and during one particularly bluegrassy number, we discovered that one of the girls in attendance had spent years as a clogger. After some encouragement, she busted out into this incredible clogging routine and tore it UP. It was incredible and so funny!

I tried to come home on Tuesday, I really did. But the snow was so intense that everyone's flights got cancelled and we ended up back at the lodge for another night. It was good though, because I got to hole up and write on a project I'm working on for almost 4 hours. Wednesday morning, the weather cleared up completely and I made it to the airport by noon. After a non-eventful flight back to Denver and a 6 hour layover in the Denver airport, I made it back to St. Louis, 9pm on Wednesday night.