So remember back in this *Click_here* post about our big out west trip way back when?

Well since we actually live in the west now the mere thought of how close we are to all of this has us very excited!

On the very last day of that trip we stopped at a place in the Rocky Mountain National Park called Never Summer Ranch. It's an actually ranch that a German family built and lived on and operated it as a guest house up until the 70s

In the mid 70s the family sold the ranch to the park and has operated small tours of the ranch

You need to walk a bit to get to it and back on our trip, since it was our last day I stayed back to clean the rental camper so that we could return it ( jay stayed back with me ) and Scott , Ryan. And Ali went and had a blast.

They came back with this picture and it has been a family favorite for all these years. In fact it has been on Scott's desk at work since then!

Scott's birthday is next weekend and Ali won't be here so the kids decided to celebrate a weekend early. Ali made a delicious ice cream cake and a great card with some inside family humor thrown in for fun and we decided to spend the day at Rocky Mountain National Park!


( the fact that I can even say this is a day trip has me giddy)


Aaaaand. We visited never summer ranch ( with me Included this time ) and the kids surprised Scott by doing this 
isn't this just CRAZY????  I mean seriously? what a great idea as a gift for him... He is actually wearing the same shirt in both pics. ( the kids tried as hard to re create their exact positions as in the original pic :) 

ok.. we are headed out for pre- birthday pizza.. I just wanted to share this with all of you.

here are a few other pics from our day.... I'll spend more time on this tomorrow. 

smooch!