Some pictures from vacation

I have some book reviews, but we'll worry about those later. For right now, pictures of the vacation to Colorado. And happy 4th of July to my American readers!

Here is my husband and I in Boulder, Colorado. We're drinking tea while waiting to take a tour of the Celestial Seasonings tea factory.

Aside from seeing and smelling the enormous boxes and bags that held the raw materials for the tea, we helped ourselves to an extreme tent sale and spent about $7.00 on a big box of tea.

The Rockies aren't really that big after all. Ha ha. We drove through the Rocky Mountain National Park, and discovered the meaning of the words "Altitude Sickness".

Great Sand Dune National Park. I kept feeling like I was in an alien landscape as we climbed up the sand dunes. Climbing up is nothing easy, as the footholds keep shifting on you. Climbing back down is marginally easier, because you kind of go into a controlled fall.

And yet, despite the barrenness of the dunes, there is life. It was hard to believe, but there are specialized plants, bugs, and even a type of rat that live on the dunes.

We stopped in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, to enjoy the hot springs. For a ridiculous sum of money, we got to watch the sun set from a variety of natural mineral springs. My swim suit still smells of sulfur.

So that is our vacation in a nutshell. I did not make too much time for reading on vacation, but I did read a little bit of Farworld, and since coming home, I've gone through The Absolute Sandman Volume 1. I picked it up from the library the day before we left on vacation (it includes the first four volumes and weighs about 10 pounds). My younger brother came over that same night so he could drive us to the airport, and he spotted that book. From 10:30pm until we got up at 4:45am, he read that book. When we came out to the living room where he was camping out, my brother was laying on the floor, with the last page of the book open in front of him, his feet still on the couch. "Finished it," he said when we woke him up, "About 20 minutes ago."

I'm still trying to decide what I want to do for the 4th of July. Trek up to my parent's house to see fireworks or stay at home? What are your plans?