Colorado Day 3: Winter Park

It was really nice that we got to go to a place we wouldn't have ever thought of going to.  Ojas's friend, Regan, had recently got a job in Fraser.  Fraser is about a mile from Winter Park.  Combined these two towns have something like 3000 permanent residents.  This changes during...well, winter...when thousands of skiiers come for the resort.  It was pretty quiet when we went there though.  Needless to say, Winter Park was a very pretty and charming little town.  

We got to town on our second night.  The next day we would check out the summer activities at the ski resort.  But for that night, Regan took us to a really good pizza place.  The whole bar/restaurant was covered in personalized dollar bills.

 

Imagine my surprise when we got seated at our table and I was placed right in front of this:

There was all kinds of excitement before we went out the next day.  I guess someone decided that it wasn't fair for us to not see any cool wildlife in the Rocky Mountain National Park because on our way back to Regan's apartment we saw a fox in the parking lot! Poor thing was so skinny though.  This is the closest shot I could get without the risk of getting rabies.  See it?

The next day Ojas and I were off to the resort.  Again, this was a ski resort with no snow buuut they had stuff you could do during the summer.  The place itself was fun to be around.  It was like Disney with real buildings.

The resort had an assortment of things to do.  We went on this "ride" got the GYROEXTREME which involved us sitting in this contraption and getting spinned upside down...over and over again for two minutes (Ojas laughed like a little girl on this one).  We ran through a maze which involved finding all four letters of the word "MAZE" and making it out by a certain time (the problem with this was that we had just eaten and running after the first minute would probably end up in puking...so we jogged and sometimes walked very quickly).

One of the two more exciting things to do were the ski lift up to the top of (and back down) the mountain.  It was a nice ride.  It made me feel a little uneasy knowing that we were going high in this rickety chair held by this rickety cable.

 

and higher...

and higher...

The most funnest (to be grammatically correct) thing to do at the resort was definitely the alpine slide.  If you've never been before, I highly recommend it.  It's so awesome.  We went on this thing like 10 times...each time getting faster and faster.

  

 

As you probably noted, this little white girl is neither I nor Ojas. I wish I could've gotten pictures of us on it. 

Story time:

I had been alpine sliding a few times with my dad and brother when I was younger.  I used to love it until one very traumatizing experience.  I was just a wee young lassie of probably 8 years back then and I was reckless.  I was gunning it down the slide and realized too late that someone in front of me had gotten scared and decided to stop...in the middle of the track.  I didn't have enough time to brake and neither did the person behind me.  Flash forward 30 seconds later and there are three crying kids stranded mid-mountain on the side of the track.  I don't remember much about what happened after...but I think our dads came to our rescue.

...16 years later and I was ready to alpine slide again.  There was this one run down the slide that did frighten me.  It seemed like there was a marmot party going on and all of them were on a mission to creep me out.  Every 20 feet or so I saw one of these peeking over...I thought they'd hop onto the track and I'd run them over!

I got by safe though and no marmots were harmed during my sliding.  Funny thing is that I probably rode down 6 more times and I never saw another one after that.

On a last note, Winter Park was both relaxing and fun.  Sadly it was our last full day left in Colorado.  The next day we headed back to Denver.