Colorado
We’ve spent the past 7 months chasing summer around the globe, enabling us to tuck little more than a single sweater and pair of pants into our bursting-at-the-seams carry-on bags, but if you were to ask any of the three boys in this family what their favorite season is, the resounding response would be ‘winter!!’. None of them could fathom spending an entire year without a single snowball fight or excursion on skis, so we decided to steer our itinerary back to Colorado for a month, enabling us to cram as much winter into 31 days as possible. And winter we got! A combination of mother nature producing one of the snowiest winters in Colorado’s recent history combined with the flexibility of a homeschool schedule which allowed us to ski during the week and fit school into the weekends and early mornings meant that we basically did a swan dive into a pile of powder and stayed put for the entire month. Not to mention all the friends and family we were able to see, soaking up every minute of laughter, love, playing and storytelling that we had been missing the past 200+ days of traveling. Without a doubt the hardest part of a nomadic lifestyle is the distance from your community; you meet people along the way and forge unique, interesting connections and friendships, but there is nothing that can replace the soul filling, heartwarming goodness that comes from your very own people. The best part of those deep, true friendships is that you can seamlessly fall in right where you left off, which meant those 4 weeks in Colorado refilled our tanks and left our hearts bursting with gratitude for the community that we are so lucky to have.
Perhaps the most shocking realization of our month back at home was how much it hurts to come to elevation after nearly a year spent at sea level, and how out of aerobic shape you get when you’re not mountain biking and trail running, backcountry skiing and downhill shredding (the boy’s favorite description of skiing) on a daily basis. We were all gasping for air by the top of the staircase and our thighs were burning constantly for the first few weeks as we slowly earned back our legs and lungs of old. We settled ourselves in at Mimi’s house in Tabernash where we had stashed all of our toys, books and clothes, a much more comfortable extension of our storage locker back in Boulder. I wish I could encapsulate the joy of the boys as they dove into their beds of lovies, rediscovering each missed sea turtle, snow leopard, panther and whale. They kept yelling “this is the best day EVER!!!!” as they smelled, snuggled, and buried themselves in a pile of fur, spots and patterns. We were also all completely overwhelmed by the abundance of stuff, even the condensed version of stuff, that awaited us in Winter Park, remarking at the ability to change outfits daily, dive into a complicated craft project, read physical books and bake to our hearts desire. A stark contrast to the carry-on life we’d been living.
We ventured back to Boulder for much needed haircuts, facials, doctors, dentist visits, and dermatologist checkups after our 9 months of summer. We immersed ourselves in friends and food, rediscovering favorite restaurants we had been missing, exploring the new flavors in town that popped up while we were away, and most of all, relishing bottles of really, really good wine, something we’d been missing since we left France back in September. Holden had a sleepover with his BFF and I went out for a girls’ night, an actual, adult girls’ night in real grown-up clothes. We spent as much time as possible playing in North Boulder Park and eating Sweet Cow ice cream. Walking into Whole Foods was practically transcendent, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time wandering the aisles buying all the perfectly curated ORGANIC!!! produce, oat milks, sprouted nuts, seeds, and specialty foods that had been missing during the months on the road. We slowly started to regain our lung capacity through snowshoe romps, cross country ski jaunts and back country touring adventures whenever we could sneak away, courtesy of the amazing Mimi. We snuck up to Snowmass to celebrate Holden’s birthday, taking full advantage of our Ikon passes, skiing from open to close every day for a week with our insatiable boys. It snowed 11 inches on Holden’s birthday, and he celebrated by learning to absolutely crush powder, complete with lots and lots of head-dives into too deep piles along the way. Poor Huxley wasn’t physically big enough to make it through and had to ski in my trail as I tried to snow plow a path he could navigate. They both were ecstatic.
We ventured over to Crested Butte to meet with our builders and see the hole in the ground that someday will become our future home. We had hoped that there would be more than just a hole as we had discussed framing through the winter, but when we saw the snowbanks that reached taller than our (very tall) van at the end of the driveway and the piles of snow that reached all the way up to the eaves of roofs around town, we understood why there hadn’t been more progress. We explored Mount Crested Butte, our first time on the ski area, the boys getting increasingly excited for future winters spent ripping around the mountain with friends, discovering hidden tree paths and the very best jumps. We donned snowshoes and plodded around our property, finding the perfect trees to house future tree forts and chutes that would become future sledding hills. I didn’t know if it would be overwhelming or exciting to be in CB, the looming unknown of the next chapter in a new town, a new home, a new life… Honestly it was a little of both. We took a tour of the CB school, visiting future classrooms and meeting a few teachers, checking out the library and watching all the kids run around between classes and outside for recess, the playgrounds literally buried in snow. The boys were rather overwhelmed by the size and the chaos, a massive transition from their teeny tiny independent school in Boulder and a stark contrast to our homeschool/world school routine. We spent a lot of time talking and processing, identifying what we’re most scared of and what we will most miss, and starting to dream forward to all there is to be excited for in a new place; school, friends, sports, life…all the infinite paths the future can hold. It was a stark contrast to this year, constantly marked by forward motion and non-stop exploration, but I think we are all excited to settle into stability for a few minutes and catch our collective breath. One of the most incredible things to come out of this year of togetherness is the openness of dialogue between us all, the feeling that we are a unit, a team, and that we make decisions as such. We have really emphasized that the boys’ voices and opinions, their comforts and discomforts and needs and wants, are just as important as our own, and we’re entering this next chapter with the same understanding, that if something isn’t right, if it’s not working, that we can make a change. We can always move back to New Zealand ;)
Perhaps most indulgent thing we did while home was leaving the boys (along with their two best friends) for 4 days with our prior nanny, a miracle of a woman who could easily give Mary Poppins a run for her money, while the parents all snuck up to Thelma Hut, a small backcountry haven tucked into the San Juan Mountains between Ouray and Silverton that is about as close to heaven as you can get. It was our 4th year in a row on this very same weekend and this year eight of us gathered to celebrate our closest friend’s 40th birthday in the best way possible: exhausting ourselves on all-day ski tours, stopping regularly to breath, snack and take in the awe inspiring beauty that is the San Juan mountains, then baking ourselves in the sauna each evening, followed by eating everything we could get our hands on and staying up way too late, laughing, drinking and celebrating. I don’t know if there is a better way to reconnect and refill your tank than time spent in the mountains with your best friends. It was also a good reminder that after nearly a year exploring some of the most beautiful reaches of the world, Colorado is a magical place to call home.
In our month at “home”, we managed to sneak in over 20 days of skiing with the boys and watched them completely skyrocket, not just getting their feet back under them as we had originally hoped, but turning into proper little rippers, hunting powder and ripping through the bumps, ditching us through trees and truly carving up the mountain. By the end of our 4 weeks, I could barely keep up with Holden in the bumps and Huxley wasn’t far behind. We closed out our time in Colorado with an exclamation point of a last weekend in Boulder, reloading our suitcases and soaking up every last ounce of friend and family love before taking off for the final leg of our adventure, 6-weeks living aboard a sailboat in the BVIs, teaching the boys to sail and navigate and trying our hand at boat-schooling. Wish us luck!!
