Family vacation to Colorado

You may expect these London residents to take vacations in Europe. Some of us have not explored much of Colorado before, and we were going there anyway for Molly's Keystone wedding extravaganza. Molly had three days of festivities planned, and the FD Linges turned the trip into an eight day road trip from the southwest of Colorado to the center. There will be plenty of time for -- and there will be many -- European vacations. But, first, Colorado.

We flew from London to Dallas to Durango (Bobby's tenth and eleventh flights). Going through immigration in Dallas was a surprisingly painless experience. In Chicago we wait in much longer lines and always get harassed because Christine's immigration documents are out of date because the US government can't be bothered to update them (so we have government agents mad at us for suffering from government inefficiency -- pretty much sums up federal government logic).

Durango is an old mining town on a plateau in southwestern Colorado nearby several ski areas, including Telluride. While many mines have closed, now the town is popular as a summer and winter holiday destination. My friend Noah lives there and housed us for a few days. The main Durango tourist attraction is the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, which is a very old steam powered train that slowly takes you up into the mountains to Silverton, an old mining town (actually, all of these towns are "old mining towns"). At the Durango train station there is also a museum of old train memorabilia and even old steam engines parked inside.

Bobby with his Uncle Noah viewing the scenery from the train window -- curious fellow loves looking out the window.

From Durango, we drove on back roads twisting through the grand Rocky Mountain scenery -- taking a few wrong turns along the way -- to Snowmass. I wanted to visit Aspen, but hotels in Aspen were so many multiples higher than at Snowmass.

Aspen is a neat but obnoxious town. My grandparents used to own a condo in the town and ski (and party) there back in the days when Aspen was one of the only places in the US where you could engage in downhill skiing. My Uncle Skeeter has memories of hippies living in the town square and stray dogs roaming the town in the 1960s. Of course Hunter S. Thompson lived nearby too -- indicating attractiveness to the counterculture.

FD Linges posing in front of Aspen Square, where once upon a time our forebears would rest in between ski adventures and après-ski parties. Speaking of après-ski parties, it was in Aspen that my grandfather mistook the famous novelist, Leon Uris, for someone he'd met on the train from the Midwest and called him "drunken dentist from Omaha." He was the original habitual line stepper.

Having fun with Bobby, crawling up the hill at a small park in Aspen.

Is it possible Aspen used to be a mountain hippy community instead of the hysterically expensive city on a hill it is today? My review of several articles and Internet-sources lead me to believe that it has always been fairly elite and expensive, but the real estate prices have risen faster than any other prices for anything anywhere. While it used to be possible for hippies to live in the town square or in nearby trailers and work on the mountain and in the service industry, nowadays the workers have to commute from much further away, dare they do anything to harm property values. Nowadays, however, the greater-Aspen area roads and public transportation system are much more conducive to these long commutes. However, recently there has been some controversy because the workers were driving old cars that caused "too much pollution" for the very special city of Aspen.

Aspen is a lovely town, but in this day of rising inequality, we are doing more harm than good when we purposely segregate humans by wealth. Palpable inequality breeds anger and, apparently, orange Presidents. I would love to spend some time in a tranquil mountain town with good food that maybe looks like Aspen but without the abject snobbery.

With Aspen in the rear-view mirror of our rented Toyota Corolla, we headed over Independence Pass to Breckenridge for a warm-up family reunion lunch before the main wedding event in Keystone. Independence Pass, if you've never driven over it before, makes for some hairy driving. The road creeps precariously on a mountain side, and in places it narrows to one lane even on curves. This precarious driving may describe a lot of the roads we took on our road trip over the back roads of western Colorado. But the scenery is always spectacular.

The wedding was held at the base of River Run in Keystone. It was a lovely and fun wedding with most of our extended family there. There was lots of eating and drinking and even some dancing.

Classic photo of Bobby with his gugu, heading up Keystone Mountain on the River Run Gondola. (Gugu may have insisted I take several photos until I captured one she liked -- and after initially assenting to this photo, now she hates it.)

Bobby and his cousin Hendrik keeping themselves entertained during the wedding.

The FD Linges' place settings, designed to be ultra-hygge by cousin Molly.

The bride and groom getting down. It wasn't actually a shirtless wedding until just at the end.

The FD Linges stop for one more mountain top picture before heading out of the mountains to Denver International. Family photos at this point are a tradition dating back to my first trips to Keystone with my parents. Welcome to the tradition, Bobby.