I do not even know where to start with this trip. What seemed to have been a nice peaceful trip
turned into the craziest trip of our lives.
A few months ago my friend Kanwal had invited us to her wedding in
Colorado, it was a Muslim-Pakistani wedding. Plans were that we were not
attending, until I realized Greg had those days off and I did as well, AND
tickets weren’t that expensive. So we
booked the flights. We not only booked
flights but made plans for the weekend.
The first night, we arrived at around 11pm, by the time we got the car
it was 11:45pm and we still needed to drive about 3 hours to get to our
campsite. We were spending the night at
Kite Lake, south of Breckenridge.
By the time we arrived at our campsite it was around 3am or
so. I try not to go into detail, but this time I have to, as not to distort the
story once I tell my kids in the future. I never realized the streets going up
to the mountain were not paved, I missed that on reading about mt. Lincoln. We rented a small very small car! At 3am you
couldn’t see anything but 10ft in front of the car. Going up the hill was an
adventure, I was driving while Greg was clinging to the seat with a panic
straight pale face (not exaggerating).
Cliffs on either side that we couldn’t see, and literally one of the
scariest drives when it’s 3am and you don’t know what you’re doing. Made it up
the hill, unpacked, set up the tent. All of this took a while since altitude
was 12,000+ we were breathing hard.
Let’s add that it was in the 40’s too and extremely windy! We got inside
the tent and try to warm up, we also attempted to sleep! Greg slept for sometime in my warm and cozy
sleeping bag, while I froze and got maybe 1hr of sleep.
The next morning we started our trip at around 9am I think.
We hiked all the way up to Mt. Lincoln (11th highest in the
continental US) with 14,293ft elevation.
It was hard, very very hard. Greg kept on stopping to catch a breath,
elevation was killing us. We made it
though, it was super fun! It was awesome to be up there the view was sweet! We
were up there for sometime, took pictures and enjoyed the views. Then came back
down, that part was a lot harder for me, my knees hurt a lot, plus the rush to
wanting to use the restroom didn’t help. We made it back down at around 1:30pm.
Drove to the wedding location which was delayed from 5pm to
7pm to 11pm! However we really enjoyed the festivities, we stayed at the house
my friend had rented. Her family was also there too, we enjoyed it, and of
course the ritual was very different!
Went to bed at around 2am, and got up at 5:30am to take on the next
adventure. Drove another two hours and made it to the whitewater rafting place!
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We whitewater rafted the Colorado river, it was really nice,
the water was super cold, so I wore my wetsuit! (YAY!) Drove back another two
hours to the second part of the wedding.
More celebrations and a beautiful dress worn by the bride, then drove at
around 11 to Denver, and arrive at around 1:30-2am. Slept in Jadi’s place (the
groom’s house) set off the alarm!! AHH! And got it to shut off at least, it was
so so scary. Then off to bed, for a few
hours until we had to get up to go to the airport. We had to be at the airport at 6am, flight
was delayed for about an hour, we were exhausted!
Finally made it home, we of course decided to go to bed
right away. We got up late and remembered that we were supposed to greet people
at church, so quickly changed into semi-nice clothes, fixed up my hair and off
to church! Once we were done greeting,
we went back home.
