blogging from church

This is a little weird. I'm blogging from church. But it's okay because I'm not in church. I'm in charge of "working" one Sunday a month at church, which means I show up before anyone else and make sure everything is set up and ready to go. I also answer phones and help people find things and really just be around and available to answer questions and handle crises (like how every couple of months our ceiling will start leaking water, or a toilet will overflow or something).

Anyway, the first service is going on right now, and that means that for about the next 45 minutes I won't really have much to do. So I'm blogging.

Yesterday Elizabeth and I took a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. This is one of the three weekends this summer when admission to national parks is FREE so we decided to take advantage! We hiked for a couple hours along a beautiful river that was full of rapids. The turn-around point of our hike was at a place called Calypso Cascades. A huge cascading waterfall that was, simply put, tremendous. We loved it. On the way back down the trail it rained quite a bit, which wasn't particularly fun, but it was still an enjoyable and beautiful trek. After our hike we drove along Trail Ridge Road -- the main road that goes all the way through the park. It's also the highest continuous paved road in the continental U.S. We'd never driven that road before, and it was awesome! I never realized how high 12,000+ feet was. I think the fact that it was a cloudy rainy afternoon even added something to it. For much of the drive we were higher than many of the clouds. The road literally travels along the very top of the mountains. It was like another world up there. Usually when you're driving through the mountains you're still really driving between the mountains, so you still look up to see everything. On Trail Ridge Road, however, the tops of the mountains are pretty much level with you. We were looking down onto a whole bunch of snow and clouds. Anyway, that's about the best I can describe our trip yesterday. Just believe me when I say it was awesome.

So today I'm sore (from the hike) and tired (from a lack of sound sleep the last couple of nights). But I'm excited about the day nonetheless.

A couple of funny stories from our hike (it was a terribly busy trail on probably one of the busiest days of the year):

As we were hiking up the trail we passed a family headed down. The little boy, who couldn't have been older than 5, said, "...yeah, and the sooner we get down, the sooner we can get in the hot tub."

On the way down we passed another family where a little girl (probably 7 or 8) was offering to give her little sister (4 or 5) a piggy-back ride. Her dad said, "No, I don't want you giving her a piggy-back ride while we're on this trail." The older daughter complained, "But you did it." To which the dad replied somewhat irritated, "I'm also 38, and much stronger than you."

Elizabeth? Did I miss any of the funny stories?