(Several images have been taken by my reunion-ees)
Well, the reunion is sadly over. We all just enjoyed the reconnection. It was brilliant, cup-filling, home-coming, affirming, recognition of kinship…. On and on I could go.
I will try to summarise each day just a little
Thursday afternoon:
When I last posted, I had just sat down to a 5 pm salad from Whole Foods….
Well less than a minute into the yumminess, I got a message from a classmate, Lisa ( who I was staying at the hotel with that night) saying that she and Heather, a girl from the year above us had been catching up and they wanted to meet me to drop my bags off at the hotel and then all go out for dinner.
I scoffed down the marinated feta and ran across the road to catch the train to the airport.
I got off a couple stops before the airport and the girls picked me up.
After hello hugs, we pondered our dinner options and settled on El Salvadoran food!
How good it was!
We ate a shared plate that was amazing and caught up with Salvadoran tunes in the background. Such a fabulous dinner and nice to get to know Heather a bit too.
Once we farewelled Heather, it wasn’t long before our third hotel roomie arrived from Canada. Sheri!
We caught up and got ready- the air of anticipation of our reunion the next day did not stop us from sleeping.
Friday:
We enjoyed free breakfast at the hotel. Our staggered reunion exposure was great as we were meeting everyone in a stages meant it was not overwhelming. This was not really on purpose. This was partly thanks to Microsoft.
The Microsoft fiasco was starting to wreak havoc with our reunion attendees, grounding some, delaying others for hours. Taking one attendee out altogether. 😢
We met up with classmate Ryan and then met 3 more at a close-by Ruby Tuesday for lunch.
After a fun lunch, we headed to Walmart to grab supplies.
Our friend (and lift up to the mountains), Kris, met us there and we meandered up the mountains.
We were leaving hours later than planned due to Kris’s numerous and frustrating flight delays.
By the time we arrived-Angie, Desta and Kiri had made the main home base lodge very nice and welcoming, having set out coffee and hot water and all the drinks and snacks were available.
We of course had way too much food on hand.
Being so late, we had also brought up lots of hot pizza.
The very stressful thing was that the accommodation is in a very poor wifi area and the pay machine would not process the money just lying there in my Wise card.
After lots of back and forth- a time that really killed the joyous greetings-I transferred my money to Lisa and she paid with her card. She did this with good faith as my money did not show up on her card
At the writing of this, it still has not shown up!
Anyhoo- Friday night was catching up and hearing stories and eating pizza. And making sure our plans were in place for our drive Trail Ridge Road up the Rocky Mountains the next morning.
Saturday morning saw us having breakfast including Angie’s sticky buns, and entering the Rocky Mountains National park before 10 and enjoying a leisurely drive up the scenic road for the next nearly 5 hours.
When we got back we enjoyed good food and good company. It is one of those situations where you don’t want to miss ANYTHING.
We played games and scoured old yearbooks and reminisced and updated each other on classmates and ourselves.
Some of us went back to the park to do some moose spotting at dusk. Unsuccessful.
We didn’t have too late a night as the next morning was our early entry hike.
Sunday saw us up at 5 am, grabbing coffee and sticky buns and at the park by 6:30.
The light and path and sounds of nature had us in awe. Each turn was more stunning. Bear Lake is gorgeous.
Bierstadt lake: gobsmacking .
One funny thing was that we spent at least 20 minutes enroute hiking in silence in order to give us a better chance of stumbling across wildlife, particularly moose. We only encountered chipmunks and scolding squirrels.
Later, as we admired Bierstadt lake’s beauty in reverent silence, we heard and then saw three very loud stomping tourists heading our direction and felt a little indignant
The main lady, it turned out is a regular here and knows all the haunts to see wildlife. She had earlier seen a moose with babies!
We got a little lost on the path back, taking a longer, more treacherous path than was necessary,
We appreciated the shuttle back to our cars.
After lunch we played a fun conversation game, we began to prepare the Swahili dinner that Lisa had organised for us. Chapati, samosas, stew, irio and chai.
It was fabulous. We finished the night on a slideshow of our year.
Packed our stuff and some of us had an early night. Kiri was driven to a shuttle that would take her to her flight in Denver by Angie and Desta at about 1:30am!
The Monday morning had us up and dismantling the home base camp, throwing away rubbish and packing up our cars. We had another farewell, but most of us met in Denver at an Ethiopian restaurant for lunch.
The owner of the restaurant came to take some pictures of us and it was like he had never used a phone to take pictures before. We showed him how to press the button even. It took a long time, he kept photographing and photographing.
These are his pics:
We said a majority of goodbyes but we met Lynnette and her husband Marty at the El Salvadoran restaurant.
That was closed, so we went with Mexican instead. I didn’t know that complementary chips and salsa are a thing in the States with Tex Mex, so I ordered corn chips and dips. Look at all our corn chips.
Good dinner, great catchup, then third last goodbye and home to bed.
My time here has been all the gushy adjectives and I am so grateful.
Tomorrow begins the long journey home!
Dory the Explorer 