Birthday Road Trip

I had an absolutely TERRIFIC birthday road trip to Denver last weekend.

On part of the 3 1/2 hour drive over, I read 2 Roald Dahl short stories. The first, The Vicar of Nibbleswicke, is a HILARIOUS story! The other was The Hitchhiker. I used voices & everything. I just love Roald Dahl. We ate homemade wild blueberry jelly & gruyere/Amish creamery cheese rolls, which were delicious & I can't wait to make again!

We stopped in Golden, Colorado & walked up & down the main street. We ate at Grappa Mediterranean Bistro, which was super yummy. I ate the spinach fettuccine with artichoke hearts, sun dried tomatoes & asparagus. I practically licked my bowl. Susan had some nasty bowl full of squid & other sea creatures. She loved it though. 

During our trip, one of our main objectives was to accomplish a list of 37 Random Acts of Kindness, as part of a celebration in honor of my 37th birthday. The whole shebang will be in a post tomorrow. I can't WAIT to share! I'm even looking into doing a story about it for my local newspaper. This project literally consumed us. We decided it was a bit more difficult accomplishing this task in an unfamiliar territory. But we did it! (Stay tuned tomorrow!)

We stayed at The Curtis, which is right next to the Performing Arts Center in downtown, where we would be attending the show "Wicked" the next afternoon. Oh. My. Golly. The Curtis is such a fun hotel!!! Every floor has a theme. We stayed on the 11th floor: The Chick Flick floor. The hallways are decorated with posters, pictures, memorabilia & pop art to accommodate each theme. (Floor #13 is called "Dun Dun Dunnnn!". A silhouette of Freddy Krueger greets you as you exit the elevator. We took ourselves on a little tour of the whole hotel.) We even got a wake up call from Elvis. Susan called the front desk & asked, "Can we get a wake-up call from Mr. T??" Apparently you can't request who wakes you up. But I died laughing anyway because I bet Susan never thought she'd ask a question like that in her life.

We spent all day on Saturday walking in Denver. My feetsies were super tired. We were full from lunch, so we ate my favorite avocado eggroll appetizers at The Cheesecake Factory, before heading back to the hotel for complimentary chocolate chip cookies before bed. We borrowed Battleship from the hotel lobby & competed to sink each other's ships. (P.S. - I won.)

Sunday morning brought us a windy cold day, but we managed to take a tiny stroll to Rocket Fizz soda pop & candy shop & buy goodies for our fam. What a super fun place!! And, Kat, that works there, is about as bubbly & friendly as they come. That place has so many different flavors of pop: bacon, sweet corn, cucumber, pumpkin pie, hot wings, coffee, the list goes on! 

After changing into a more cute pair of shoes, we walked to The Corner Office, the restaurant next to our hotel & shared sweet corn crepes. (Again, more yummy food!!!!) Then we were off to the theater to watch the show. I wished we had closer seats, but was grateful at getting any at all. (I'm pretty sure when we bought the tickets only a month before, the two seats we had were the last PAIR together.) Wicked was all things wonderful. I need to do stuff like that more often. I just love theater & musicals & broadway. Can't wait to take the girls to a show someday! 

Our drive home was filled with chatter about the musical. We also finished up the last of our Random Acts of Kindness list & pulled into an Arby's to order food & celebrate. We were so hungry & tired, but full of happy. I have not laughed like I did on this trip in a long time. 

What an excellent birthday I've had.

To view all the pics from our trip, visit my album HERE.

To view my blog post about our "37 Random Acts of Kindness" Project, click HERE.

♥