Steamboat Springs, CO

Lafayette, CO - Tomorrow, at 11:00am, I go in for my knee surgery. The good doc is going to replace my torn ACL with a fresh, newish one from some dead guy (hopefully one with good knees). Thanks go out to Stacy, Nicole, and my physical therapist for giving me a lot of good advice and scaring the living hell out of me. I'm really not looking forward to being laid up again. The good news is that the knee should be pretty much as strong as ever in a few months.

In the past two weeks I've managed to get my knee strong enough to walk without a limp, the swelling has gone way down and I've managed to keep most of my calf and thigh muscles. So, this past weekend we decided to head up to Steamboat, CO to check out the town and meet up with friends. We had actually planned the trip before I tweaked my knee, the idea being to use a few of the six days of skiing I had on my Rocky Mountain Super Duper Plus Pass (or whatever they call it). Jake and Jovie were going to join us, and our friend Jen W. was going to be up there with a large group of ski buddies. Not only that, but I was hoping to meet up with Diana, a friend from my Peace Corps days, who had recently relocated to Steamboat. And on top of all that, some folks had organized a fire show up at Strawberry Park Hot Springs on Friday night that I wanted to check out. Since the skiing was a relatively small part of the weekend we decided to head up anyway, bum knee in tow.

Fire Show at Strawberry Hot Springs

Suwei and I made it out to the Fire Show on Friday. Jake & Jovie joined us for a stroll around town and short hike on Saturday. We were able to meet up with Diana, Jay (her husband), their friends visiting from Chicago, Jen W. and her crowd of ski buddies at the Slopeside Bar (an ice bar beside...you guessed it...the slopes) that afternoon. Sunday I returned to the Strawberry Park Hot Springs for another soak and had lunch with Diana and crew. Overall, a great weekend! It was extra nice to be mobile for a bit longer.

Steamboat Springs, CO

Also, for those of you that have not been spammed enough already regarding the canoe trip I'm putting together...mark your calendars! June 5th to the 7th we're going up to Healdsberg, CA again. We would love to see as many of you as we can. It has been a great way for us to get friends together. Well, that and getting married, but you can't do that every year. Here is the link to the yahoo group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Rivertrip2009/. And here is a link to the new Facebook Event I posted: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=61982490985&ref=nf.

And without further ado, here is the link to the Steamboat slide show for more photos and comments:

Steamboat Springs, CO