The best summer yet

I have to say that this is my best summer yet here in Buena Vista. I've finally met some great friends with similar interests which helps this town finally feel like my home. It was a hard transition for me to uproot my life from Denver and put a distance of 125 miles between the friends and family I have known all my life. Kirk has always felt at home here since this is where he grew up, but I on the other hand didn't really know what to expect. I just knew that I was willing to give it a go because I felt like the Denver city life thing was old hat and I was ready to try on the "mountain life" that has been Kirk's dream ever since I've known him. I'm not going to lie and say it was an easy adjustment for me. I think part of the problem was living in the tepee. We were somewhat isolated up in them there hills which impeded us from having much of a social life. We did meet a few people in town that we became friends with, but I have to say that I continued struggling with feeling confident that this was the right place for us. The other part of that was the continuance of living in a temporary situation. We had moved around and traveled for so long before settling here that I was couldn't help feeling like a small potted plant. It wasn't until we bought a permanent structure of a home last October where I was able to break out, dig in and expand my roots. Living in town has opened up a whole new group of friends to us. I can't explain how good it feels to walk around town recognizing faces, waving to friends and having the sense that we really do belong here.

I recently met a great group of women who are all active outdoors people too. We decided to start mountain biking together and it's been a blast! Last year I was really into running and was able to check off running a marathon from my life list. I've been looking for a different activity since my back still aggrevates me when I run and I think mountain biking is the ticket. It's low impact on the joints and it's a great balance of adrenaline, technical thinking and good ol' heart pumping aerobic exercise. I never thought I'd be a mountain biker much less pick it up at 36 years of age, but isn't it the darndest thing that life can still suprise you.

So lately our lives look like this: wake up between 7 and 8am (alarm clocks are only used when absolutely necessary), have a liesure coffee and breakfast on the couch, walk to our office which is 5 minutes from our house, get some work done, leave around 5pm, walk 5 minutes back to our house, grab our gear and go down to the river park which is another 5 minutes away. Right now Kirk is really into kayaking because the water is so high, but occassionally he's off on a mountain bike ride. I usually ride down to the bridge to meet a couple of the gals for a mountain bike ride and then Kirk and I meet back at the house at dark to eat dinner and go to bed. Then we do it all over again the next day. It's pretty awesome to be so close to the activities that we love. We always think back to our Denver days when it took us between 30-60 minutes to drive home after work and then another 45-60 minutes of driving to get to a place where you could kayak or mountain bike so your actual activity time was pretty limited. We feel very fortunate to have carved out the life we now have, but we did make quite a few sacrifices to get here...so essentially we feel like we earned it.