We got home a few days ago from a lovely trip to visit my sister’s family in western New York and then into Ontario for camping. It was wonderful to see them! My niece and nephew are 8 and 4 and they are both delightful, inquisitive, and of course, adorable.
My sister Leslie and brother-in-law live in Phoenix during the year, but spend their summers in Chautauqua, NY working at the Institution there. They have a house in nearby Sherman, NY, and we enjoy visiting them and experiencing small town life as well as enjoying the events at the Institution.
The houseWe are shared this cinnamon roll at Bemus Point Inn and RestaurantWe attended the Sherman Bicentennial Parade. There is a large population of Amish people there and a family was across the street from us, collecting candy from the floats.The shriners had a float. Nearly everybody threw candy at the kids and it was a blast watching them pick it up. Luca and Louie enjoyed working together to have ChatGPT make up storiesWe saw the Orchestra play Peter and the Wolf one afternoonWe were very excited about it.Luca really liked this fan.He also enjoyed using my phone to take pictures and selfies.We went to see one lecture by two men who had hiked the Grand Canyon, not from rim to rim, but through it, by the river. Peter McBride and Kevin Fedarko, and they both have written books. It was terrific!Louie takes terrific pictures!Pretending to be a pirate who has lost BOTH eyes.We got to see Augustin Hadelich perform the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the Festival Orchestra. He played Por una Cabeza as an encore. And we got to meet him (again) after the concert at a private reception.I participated in an impromptu Suzuki play-in and busking experience with my sister and niece, and other people from the orchestra and their kids.
We had a great time: food, concerts, family time, walks, hot tub time, lectures, parades, and more! It rained more than we might have liked, but that just meant more time playing games and making Chat GPT make up stories and AI make up pictures and lots of cuddle time. With the kids, that is. After that we drove up to Canada (just Louie and I) but I’ll save that for another post, so that I can get some other things done now.
I don’t start teaching until Monday so I’ve been taking care of things around the house and learning some new music I’ll be performing at the end of the month and in September (and October, never hurts to get ahead on learning music when you have the time!). I’ve also been getting everything ready for the fall semester and trying to get my fall schedule at Wash U organized. It’s always a pain getting started but it’s also fun and you never know what each semester will look like, which keeps life interesting.
We left off in Mueller State Park and then headed to Breckenridge. We were spending the night in Frisco before the conference started in Vail. When I originally planned this trip, we were going to head home after Mueller, but when Louie got invited to his conference, it magically worked out with just one extra night!
In grad school I was lucky enough to be able to spend two summers playing with the National Repertory Orchestra in Breckenridge, Colorado. It truly spoiled me for all other mountains, at least for awhile. I had also been back a few times to visit, but not in over a decade and never with Louie. I had wanted to stay overnight in Breck, but it was more than we wanted to pay (many of the places to stay seemed more geared towards longer stays, so they would have a reasonable night fee but a high cleaning fee which would make more sense if you were there for a week or something), and the places I found to reserve camping were already full by the time we needed to book. I did find some affordable places in Frisco, so I booked a night at the Snowshoe Motel (which when I just googled it now suggested I google “snowshoe motel death” and found that somebody was murdered there in 2014, but I digress, and it was a lovely motel, seriously). But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As always, we had an amazing drive to Breckenridge. The route from Mueller State Park to Breckenridge was all state roads and was beautiful. We went through Fairplay and over Hoosier Pass. We got to Breckenridge and had lunch at the Breckenridge Brewery where I had spent a lot of time in the past. It had changed, but also hadn’t changed, you know what I mean?
Then we found a place to park near the Riverwalk Center and walked around the town. It was a busy day and people were out and about, but I enjoyed looking to see what I recognized, and sharing the town with Louie. Breckenridge is surrounded by gorgeous mountains on all sides, and is really a special place. It’s also totally crowded and expensive, and full of tourists and traffic, but that’s to be expected in today’s world.
The Riverwalk Center is where the orchestra I was with performed. It used to be more of a tent structure and they’ve made it more permanent.I spent a summer looking at this view from the Tannhauser Condominiums on Main Street. They were still there!The Blue River!
After a few hours, we were ready to head to Frisco and check into our hotel. We got cleaned up and went to do some laundry in a nearby laundromat (ah, road trip troubles), which was easy enough. Frisco is a cute little mountain too as well, but less busy, and we were still early in the season, so it was surprisingly un-busy. We had dinner at the High Side Brewery (they had a BBQ truck too.)
The next morning we had the hotel breakfast and then checked out of the hotel and headed for a hike in Frisco. I found a loop called the Frisco Peninsula Loop which contained the Lakeshore, Perimeter and Buzzsaw Loops. I suppose it was really more of a biking loop, but we had a great time hiking and enjoying the views.
After the hike, we were pretty hungry and decided Mexican was in order. I remember having a pretty good lunch at a Tex-Mex place in Frisco in the past, but we found something better, a place called Cielo Oaxaca that I highly recommend! They had excellent mole sauce and everything was delicious.
Then we headed DOWN to Vail. it would be a relief to spend a night before 9000 feet, you know!
Louie had a conference in Vail at the Grand Hyatt, so we checked in there. It was a terrific room with a balcony, and it was wonderful to hang out in and relax. Since we spent 5 days there, I’ll just give you some general things we did and some highlights rather than a day-by-day.
The view from the room, not amazing but absolutely lovely
We ate at The George in downtown Vail twice: they had a terrific happy hour special on food and drinks and we loved the vibe. We also ate at La Cantina for dinner once and had breakfast at Two Arrows Coffee. We mostly had lunches and other breakfasts at the hotel, which was naturally quite overpriced but very convenient. The food in Vail was really pricey and though I’m sure there were many amazing restaurants there, Louie’s conference took up his time so we didn’t do an evening out with an expensive restaurant.
We were able to do a few hikes. We hiked the Strawberry Lane Trail, which was mostly just hiking up ski areas, but like we said, we don’t have ski areas to hike up and across in St Louis. We also hiked the Grouse Creek Loop in Minturn (we had to get the car out of the valet parking for this one), which was a lovely hike. We kept running into people who saw a moose, starting with a man at the beginning warning us that just up the trail a moose tried to attack his dog, which we warned other people about, but never saw a moose ourselves. We saw some moose tracks in the mud, and we even heard the story that evening at the banquet, about how some man had been attacked by a moose on the Grouse Creek Loop that morning (except we saw the man and it wasn’t him, it was his dog, and his dog was okay, they were just shaken up) so we really got to experience how rumors get started, but like I said, sadly no moose for us.
Louie’s poster for his poster sessionThere was a lot of snow still remaining!We visited the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens one evening.The closest we came to a mooseThe tent where they held the poster sessions at the conference.
Honestly, the hotel was nice, but it was a bit under construction, which was annoying. There was a path to walk to downtown Vail, but parts were diverted due to construction as well. The hotel did have a wonderful free shuttle to Lionshead and Vail Village, which ran quite often, and would also take you back. We took advantage of it several times, and often ended up walking back in the evening as the weather was lovely and we wanted to get exercise (and it was downhill slightly, hah.) I loved our time in Vail, but finally it was time to go home!
We visited with friends in Denver en route, just for lunch, and then drove most of the way across Kansas. I won’t bother mentioning where we stayed overnight, but we didn’t care for it, but we got up early and finished the drive the next day and we were glad to be home!
I hope you enjoyed reading these blog recaps of our trip. I’m sorry it took me so long to get through, but perhaps that just increased the excitement? Please leave a comment if you are reading, I love hearing from readers 🙂
July has been a whirlwind. Mostly good stuff, with a small amount of COVID in it (mild illness, on a whim took a test and tested positive, but a few days later tested negative again).
I played the whole season with the Gateway Festival Orchestra this year, and it was a lot. It was fun to play so much orchestral music, but man I did not want to wake up on some of the Saturday mornings for rehearsal, haha. I also had some other random gigs: weddings and concerts, including some viola stuff.
I taught a bunch of students, and I have four more days of summer teaching left. I enjoyed having some students for just the summer, and I have set up my fall schedule, mostly.
And we did a few things with friends, though we also had to cancel some things. The most picturesque thing was going to see the Chihuly Exhibition at the Botanical Gardens.
We sadly attended a goodbye party for two friends, Michael and Heather, who are moving a few hours away. It was a wonderful party, but a sad occasion, though we are very happy for them!
We didn’t accomplish as much at the old house as we originally thought we would, but we have done a bunch of stuff at the new house. One thing we’ve been waiting on is putting stuff on the walls, but we did a little more of that this month too.
I read a ton of books this month. Highlights included Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver, Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld and Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson.
I’ve got a lot to do this morning too, so I’ll leave you with that picture of Muriel and Miles sharing a hammock.
I got up early this morning and went for a little run in the rain. It was probably better than running in the hot sun, but I get nervous about slipping so I didn’t go as fast as I might have otherwise. (Which isn’t very fast). I’m working on run/walk intervals and focusing on my form.
I start PT (as the cool kids say) on my knee next week. This excellent for-profit health care system we have meant that I had to wait three weeks for an appointment, totally logical right, that’s capitalism, for ya. Also I have no idea what it will cost, since again, that’s capitalism. But my doctor said that I should be fine running, and what better time to re-enter the world of running than when you have a knee injury? (This is a joke, but it seems to be working okay anyway.)
July has been fun but busy lately. I had a busy weekend of gigs, and I adored it. I go back and forth so much, do I want more work, do I want less work, but the truth is that I feel great satisfaction from completing things when life is busy and I enjoy performing, and this past weekend had a lot of both. I enjoyed my downtime and my free weekends during the pandemic, but I’ve been feeling more personal satisfaction from keeping my calendar a bit busier. I’ve also done a little more viola lately which has been a fun add-on activity, and I’m enjoying things right now where they are!
This week I’ve been working at a composer’s camp as part of a piano trio: the students are writing pieces for piano trio and we play them for them and give suggestions and advice. Tomorrow (wow, tomorrow is Friday already) we play a concert of all the pieces for the students and their parents. It’s been a really fun week! We also have our third Gateway Festival Orchestra concert this weekend–I’ve been playing Principal second this summer and enjoying that, and otherwise, the weekend is not so full of work. I am okay with that as I need a little recovery time from the past few weeks.
I’m off now to do another trio session at the composer’s camp. I have a full afternoon of teaching after that: teaching this summer has been good overall, and it’s fun to have a different schedule each week as some students are on vacation or have this or that camp. I enjoy the variety, which is probably why I have thrived so much as a freelancer!
Welcome to another recap of our trip in the beginning of the summer. Today is my brother’s birthday, so I will dedicate this post to him. Happy Birthday, Jesse!
I wanted to see the Royal Gorge Bridge, and despite some advice to the contrary, it made the most sense to spend the night in Canon City and see the Bridge first thing in the morning. After seeing Crested Butte and Ouray it was a bit of a disappointment arriving in Canon City. (Sorry, Canon City people!)
We stayed at an inexpensive roadside motel with great reviews, which I would say were overblown. It was fine, but I wish we might have shelled out a little more money, or perhaps just camped along the highway somewhere. Oh well! Not all itinerary options will be perfect.
The neon sign was pretty cool though.
Anyway, we had dinner in the downtown area at a place called World’s End Brewery, and then watched a silly TV show starring Arnold Schwarnegger on the computer.
Day 13: We woke up and found a coffee shop called Cafe Belay, which was terrific: delicious coffee, awesome breakfast burritos, and a fun vibe. We loved the coffee shop and it raised our opinion of Canon City and put us in really good moods.
Next we drove the Skyline Drive, which was actually pretty terrifying and worth doing if you have somebody who is okay driving on sccary roads. It was on our way out of town and we thought it was worth doing. There was a part where you could see dinosaur footprints. It’s insane to try to think about being somewhere where dinosaurs actually walked!
These are dinosaur footprints, the bumpy parts, apparently!Skyline Drive. It’s one way, and we had parked and walked up a little trail to get more view.
Next we headed to the Royal Gorge Bridge. Despite knowing it was a big tourist trap, we definitely enjoyed our stay. We beat the crowds by 1) getting there early and 2) being early in the season. You pay an entrance fee to get up close, and that gets you the gondola ride as well. You can also pay extra for other activites like rock climbing and zip lining, but we thought we had spent enough.
The Royal Gorge Bridge, an engineering marvel!
We got there right before the gondolas opened, and realized we should probably take the gondola across first, and then walk back, since there weren’t any crowds yet.
Inside the gondola!
The gondola ride was great–it was super fun to ride across and look down. My fear of heights usually doesn’t extend to mechanical things, as I have more faith in them than my own ability not to trip and fall.
You get off the gondola on the other side, and you could ride back, but we wanted to walk, so we headed down the hill to the other side of the bridge. They make you walk by some other paid attractions, just in case you change your mind too. We stopped in to see the movie, which was interesting, except it had a character that was really geared towards kids and was super annoying, so I would rate it as a mixed thing, and would have preferred just to learn more about the bridge and gorge without the weird kid part.
What a lovely view!The gondolas passing in the air
When you walk across the bridge you get some amazing views.
Around the middle of the bridge!The bridge is lined with flags from all of the states. This is Missouri’s.
Anyway, we had a little ice cream snack on the other side of the bridge and then decided to head out. Our next stop was Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. As usual, the drive there was beautiful!
I didn’t know too much about Florissant Fossil Beds except that it was close to where we were going, and it looked worth doing. We started with a picnic lunch, and then headed into the Visitor’s Center to watch a movie and look at the museum. In a nutshell, there are a lot of fossils there as well as petrified tree stumps.
The Big Stump, great name!
We took a path named The Petrified Forest Loop to see various stumps, including the largest one, aptly named The Big Stump.
Selfie in front of the Big StumpThe Big Stump from a distance, it was the real highlight!
Anyway, we walked around the path, but a storm looked like it was headed our way, so we thought we might should move on. (What is my grammar here?) We headed over by car to see the Hornbeck Homestead, in a nearby but different part of the park as well.
The Hornbeck HomesteadThis little fellow was wandering around
Our home for the next two nights would be a campsite at Mueller State Park, so we headed there next to set up, hoping that the rain would hold off. It did, enough for us to set up, but then it rained, and poured.
Our campsite
Our site was gorgeous. It would have had a view of Pikes Peak except for the cloud cover, and it honestly might have been the best site in the entire park. But it was raining, and all our plans involved the outdoors, so decided to head to a nearby brewery for a drink and maybe food.
We initially thought the rain was letting up, and as we drove out of the campground we saw a double rainbow, and immediately pulled over to take photos.
It was amazing to see!
The rain continued however, and we had a nice dinner at Paradox Brewery Company. We returned to the campsite before it got too dark, and it did finally stop raining long enough for us to get a little fire going.
Mueller State Park was at about 9600 feet of elevation, and it was cold. In retrospect we should have brought our mummy bags, but we didn’t. It was a chilly night of sleep!
Day 14: The next morning we had a reservation to drive up Pikes Peak. It was damp and cold in the morning and we decided to skip cooking at the campsite and get a coffee on the way instead. We had to throw away some trash at a trashcan with a chain to move to keep it bear safe, and the chain was covered in ice, so that tells you how cold it was. We stopped at a coffee shop, Righteous Grounds Coffee Roasters and got some coffees plus some scones right from the oven. I had been joking on our walk in that I was hungry and didn’t care what we ate, and Louie had said he was just going to ask for two human rations for breakfast. But then they pulled out the freshly baked scones and we figured that sounded pretty good!
Anyway, we got to Pikes Peak but they told us that the peak wasn’t open due to the weather (blizzard conditions up top!). They led us to believe that it might open later, and we figured we might as well drive up as far as we could, so we did.
It was a nice drive with some lovely views, but we got to the end of where they had the road blocked and yup, we couldn’t pass further. We could see up higher that the snow was blowing quite a lot. Yes, snow, and yes, we were wearing coats by this point.
The road went over that ridge ahead of us and you can see the snow blowing around.
Disappointed, we drove back down. We headed towards Colorado Springs and the Garden of the Gods next. What a different landscape!
The traffic was crazy, so we decided to pull over and park and set off on foot. You can just drive through Garden of the Gods and see a lot, but you would be in bumper to bumper traffic, which wasn’t super appealing. We did a loop trail I found on All Trails, which covered the Palmer, Buckskin-Charley, Niobrara and Bretag Trails. It was about 4 miles, fairly flat, and was a great way to see Garden of the Gods!
I’m pretty sure the biggest mountain there is Pikes Peak.
After our hike, we were hungry again (the scones didn’t have a huge amount of lasting power) so we looked for a nice restaurant in nearby Manitou Springs. I found a cool looking vegetarian place called Adam’s Mountain Cafe, and we really enjoyed our meal there! The rest of Manitou Springs, not as much. We parked and walked around downtown (my knee was hurting me a bit by this point from all the hiking) and it was overcrowded and very tourist trap like. The springs were cool, but we just didn’t love the place, and after a bit decided to get out as it just wasn’t making us happy.
Louie drinking water from a spring
It starting raining on our way back and we decided to just go to Paradox Brewing Company again for dinner: pizza and beer this time. It had been really busy at Paradox the night before but this night was totally different, less busy, very chill, and we loved it again. Louie decided to buy a Paradox T-Shirt to commemorate our times there.
We were able to make a fire again at our campsite, and the nice thing about the campsite was that the gravel bottom of it kept the tent nice and dry, but sadly still absolutely freezing. We brought more clothes into the tent and did our best to stay warm that night, but it was still a chilly night!
Day 15: It was raining in the morning a bit, but the rain let up finally and we decided we’d better pack up the tent while we could! It was funny: under the tent was completely dry (tiny gravel ground cover for the win) but the tent was damp: of COURSE the last place we camp was raining so we had to pack everything up wet. Oh well, we had had good luck with the weather before Mueller and at least the scenery was beautiful.
We decided we couldn’t leave without doing a hike, so we went for a hike! It was a little rainy seeming, but it let up pretty quickly and we had a nice hike through the woods. We took a loop sort of trail from Revenuer’s Ridge to the Lost Pond, and felt at the end that we had accomplished something and gotten a good look at Mueller State Park.
We would love to return there to camp again and go to Paradox Brewery, and maybe try Pikes Peak again! Oh, and we stayed in site #42, but don’t tell everybody, it IS the best site! (Near pit toilets though, not real bathrooms, but there are bathrooms a short drive or long walk away. and the pits were well maintained, probably because so many neighbors had RV’s.)
That’s where I will leave you. Next we will head to Breckenridge and Frisco for the day and one night, and then to Vail for Louie’s conference.
I realized my last trip recap was published without a title…oops! It seems like maybe my program could have reminded me of that, like when you try to send an email in gmail without a subject. Anyway, it’s fixed now, and I may even get a few more recaps written soon: there are probably 2 or 3 posts left and I’ve at least figured out what pictures to show you.
Mostly I just take pictures here, of Miles and sometimes Muriel (you’ll see her later in the post.)
But let’s catch up in the present, shall we? I hope you had a wonderful 4th of July (for readers from the US, that is, otherwise I hope you had a wonderful Tuesday.) I had one full week of regular work, and did some fun things as well. One of my students gave me tickets to see Ben Folds (so generous!) as they couldn’t use them, so Louie and I took advantage of our new proximity to the Metrolink (our light rail) and took it downtown to see the concert.
Ben Folds with his band. The cellist and guitarist on the left are a band called Tall Heights and they sang the first set alone–I really liked them as well.
Other social activities included having dinner with a friend who is moving, having dinner with Louie’s parents, and visiting with friends who had just moved and getting to see their new house.
Miles always has plenty to say
I also played a concert at a retirement community after some MAJOR storms–we got some crazy winds around here and a lot of trees got knocked down. Luckily we didn’t have any real damage ourselves, but some people in the city were killed by falling trees, so it was a good reminder of how dangerous these storms are.
The most recent week then: my sister Carrie visited, and we did a variety of activities. We had dinner at Olio and Mission Taco (separate visits), went to the Whitaker Music Festival concert at the Botanical Gardens, the Kemper Art Museum, and spent the 4th at two different parties with friends, both with pools.
The guest room is ready for more visitors!
I’ve been working on getting things done this summer. I’ve been doing more planning on paper (I have been inspired by a podcast I started listening to called The Best Laid Plans) and have really felt like I’ve been staying on top of my to-do- list and getting things done. I do enjoy taking my weeks and figuring out how to work things out within them, though with the caveat that it is a lot easier in the summer when my actual teaching hours are lower and my overall workload is more manageable.
Though, that brings us back to my evergreen problem of, how to work less while still bringing in the income I would like and feeling job satisfaction. I don’t see many freelance/teaching musicians who do this as a good example, so it’s a tricky thing to figure out. I will be setting up my fall schedule at the end of July, and I suspect the answer for that is, no more new students for the fall, even though I will likely get a dozen queries. For gigs, I’ve been doing some things lately I really enjoy, and I want to have room in my schedule for them. I also enjoy the weird thing of looking at my calendar empty and then gradually seeing it fill up with activities, concerts, gigs, etc. I do enjoy some days off, but I also enjoy seeing colleagues at jobs and playing fun concerts, so it is a constant game of give and take. When I do too much of any one thing I tend to wish I were doing something else.
Muriel, I promised I would share a picture! She loves jumping up on this wall.
Real talk: I do have a tendency to feel overly jealous of things I see other people doing, and some of my overscheduling is caused by a bit of FOMO though. I remind myself that nobody can play everything, and that I have had many wonderful opportunities and PLENTY of work, and I have a lovely old home which I love, and Louie and the cats, and that’s plenty to have. But I am not immune to the jealously factor, especially when so many people I went to college with or know are traveling the world playing music, or getting to sub with amazing orchestras, or who knows what. But it’s all relative, and I really try to focus on what I have in my life: for instance, I still haven’t even managed to finish telling you about my last vacation since it was so long! And I have too many students, and I am getting to play viola on a chamber music concert this week and playing four straight weekends of orchestra music with the Gateway Festival Orchestra. So, really, I am sure people are jealous of me, and I in return am jealous of them, and then we should all say, hmm, that probably cancels out, but that’s far easier said than done.
Other real talk: I think I mentioned that I slipped on the mud in May and hurt my knee? It had healed somewhat but was still bothering me so I went to the doctor last week. It looks like I sprained or strained my MCL, on the inside of the knee. It will likely heal up just fine but I am going to be doing some physical therapy, which unfortunately won’t start until later in the month. I did have the go ahead to continue running, which I have been trying to get back into, so I was glad to know that was okay to do. Hopefully the PT will get things back to normal over time!
I’m off to do some errands around the house, as one does: laundry, and probably more laundry. Oh, and for local readers, tonight is the first Gateway Festival Orchestra Concert, and the weather looks great!
