Tammy and I just finished a really great meal at the “too trendy for a pregnant lady and her husband” restaurant NoRTH in the Cherry Creek area of Denver. We made our reservations when we were here overnight before continuing to New Mexico. Tomorrow we depart, very early, to drive back home.

Our trip has been nice however the weather was not cooperative with us. Our days in Santa Fe were intended to be filled with gallery browsing. The average temperature in Santa Fe is supposed to be around 60 degrees right now. However, we were greeted with temperatures just under 40 with nasty winds. Yes we are from Minnesota and this isn’t that cold, but, this is vacation and shivering between galleries with inadequate coats is not what I call fun. We decided to go to Albuquerque on Thursday which turned out to be a great idea. We went to the Albuquerque Aquarium and Botanic Garden. Both were surprisingly good. We also did some shopping at REI and spent some our membership dividend (thanks REI Visa card!).

I’ve been suffering from a pretty bad cold ever since Wednesday. I’ve been on Dayquil/Nyquil as well as any other things that help but I’ve still been hit pretty hard. I just hate getting sick on vacation – it’s so miserable. I’m still sniffling with a box of kleenex next to me as I type this.

We went to the Great Sand Dunes National Park on our way from Santa Fe back to Denver, it only added a couple hours to our drive and was pretty impressive. As you drive towards the sand dunes they seem somewhat unimpressive, but as you get closer you realize just how immense they are. It is a real trip to be standing on these huge dunes in the middle of Colorado. After the sand dunes we had to drive over a mountain pass which took us up around 9,000 feet. Coming back down I could not get my ears to pop due to my sinuses. Finally, after many attempts my right ear popped but my left refused. It hurt and drove me generally crazy! It didn’t pop until we finally got to the hotel in Denver, hours later, and I laid down for fifteen minutes. Colds suck.

We spent this morning checking out galleries in Cherry Creek. We got a couple of pieces, including some close-out Bill Hickman items at one of the stores that we liked a lot here, Art Z!, which is going out of business. We then went to the Denver Zoo for the afternoon which was nice, however the Denver Zoo seems to be one of those zoos that was built when they just put animals in a concrete cage. To their credit they’ve been obviously working to make it better for a long time, but they still have a lot of room to go.

Gotta get some sleep for the drive tomorrow. In addition to the usual time hit we will take moving from mountain to central time we are also going to get hit by daylight savings time so we will lose 2 hours in time shifts. Tomorrow will be a long day.