Straubsgiving

For Thanksgiving this year, everyone was gathering in Aurora, Colorado. We considered driving like last year, but we did some math, and it turns out that:

Flying to Denver and renting a car was cheaper than 6-7 days of driving, restaurants, and hotels.
We’d get the same amount of time in Denver.
Those six days mean Becky can take more beautiful pictures.

[One side note: in a shocking display of neglect for people who earn money doing photography, we completely forgot all of our cameras. This entire post was shot on phones.]

So we took a late flight, which landed at 11pm. This was rough on the kids, but they were troopers, and awoke the next morning ready for action! We met my brother and his family at one of our favorite Denver attractions, the Butterfly Pavilion!

Afterward, we went for a half-mile hike around the grounds, where Becky expounded on the geological, botanical, and ecological wonders surrounding us in this strange locale.

You can’t see it in the photo, but we spotted a little bunny in the brush.

Day two was the Denver Museum of Nature and Science – for us Oregonians, this is like Denver’s OMSI. We spent an entire day here, and only saw about a third of the exhibits! We did make it through millions of years of dinosaurs…

…and to mars…

…and found the names of all these animals. We still feel like we barely scratched the surface.

Day three was Thanksgiving. We made full use of our completely separate and uncrowded kitchen to cook up some goodies for supper.

We put on our holiday best.

…and wore it to the park. The kids loooooved how Uncle Randy “pushed” them on the swings.

[Unfortunately, that’s it. We were so busy stuffing ourselves that we completely forgot to take any more pictures!]

Day Four was a travel day. We packed up our stuff, checked out of our very comfortable Airbnb, and went to my old friend Emily’s house to welcome their 5-week-old baby to the world, and say hello to their backyard goats.