Exploring the Hood

Christian and I have spent the last few days exploring Denver and our neighborhood.  So far... we love it!!  The street parallel to ours is known as Restaurant Row so there are lots of fun places to walk to and most have outdoor dining which is great.  We also love just sitting on out front porch with a beverage and people watching.  One of our first nights here we saw this gloriousness ride by:

A bar- on wheels!  You can rent this puppy for a bar "crawl."  Everyone peddles/enjoys a beer for about 20 minutes, then you stop at a bar for 20 minutes, then repeat.  Neat!

We live about 3 blocks from City Park and Cheesman Park.  So Monday we went for a walk to check out Cheeseman.  It is a big park, and not the biggest in Denver.  The park is just over 80 acres.

 There used to be a cemetery underneath- ewwww. 

Later that night we walked to an ice cream place along Cheesman called Lik's.

There was a long line and we waited about 20 minutes, even at 9:30 pm.   I went with the "Sleepless" which was: the jolt of espresso in a sweet ice cream with mounds of chocolate espresso beans.  Christian got cookie dough (boring!!).  Here is the link to the extensive flavor pages (20 to be exact) if your interested in pre-planning your flavor for your visit: http://www.liksicecream.com/flavors?pg=1

This weekend we are going to a ranch party (??) in Allenspark (about an hour outside of Denver) with my friend Carolyn- thanks for inviting us Carolyn!  We will camp out so we headed to the REI flagship store to get a tent (which we ended up returning for one we got at Sports Authority haha).  This store is huge.  They have a 47 foot rock climbing wall inside:

So we got our tent and we are ready to go... It's just "car camping" (no hiking, etc) so shouldn't be too intense.  Looking forward to meeting Carolyn's friends (so we can steal them)!

OK that's pretty much it for this post... good luck to Christian who starts his first day of work (orientation) tomorrow at the VA!!

Denver Digs

Christian and I were a bit nervous to see our new digs considering we only saw a few pictures of it.  We had no idea what the bathroom, guest room/office or backyard looked like.  We knew it would be small, but luckily we were pleasantly surprised. Bonus- the landlord had a bottle of bubbly waiting for us in the fridge!   Here is the outside:

There are 6 or 7 houses attached.  We met most of the neighbors and they were all very nice, most of them about our age, and one older man who was also very nice.  Yes we have bars on most of the windows... kind of creepy.  The house came fully furnished (we brought linens), dishes and everything.  Here is the entryway/living room/dining room:

Just past the front door to your right is the guest room/office/cat sanctuary:

Notice the animal kingdom theme going on?  This room has a jack & jill bath to the master bedroom.  The bathroom is a bit tight but it works...

I've never seen such a small house with so many doors.  On the other side of the bathroom is our bedroom.  The bed takes up the entire room.  We have a closet and a dresser.  The guest room has a closet as well.  Apparently I didn't take a picture of the bedroom sorry.  Here is the view of it from the living room:

There is a little wet bar on the way to the kitchen:

 The (tiny) kitchen:

Off of the kitchen there is a door to the basement.  It's pretty clean and has a lot of good storage space- I didn't take pictures of the whole thing.  The only thing I'm not so happy about is the old washer and dryer.  The dryer actually gets REALLY hot when you use it so the landlord is going to come take a look at it when shes in town next.  Fingers crossed she replaces it!  Everything else is nice and new:

And our little backyard:

Not much to look at right now.  There are two little 'alleys' on either side of the house, they don't connect the whole way back which gives us a tad more light.  We do have a mower but landlord wants us to water it good for a week or so before we cut it.  I plan on sprucing up the two little garden beds and planting some things (mom I can hear you laughing- just you wait and see!!).

Sooo... that's our new home.  Hope you all will come & visit us soon!!

I'm baaaaack!

Sorry for the lame blog, been a bit hectic getting married and moving across the country in the same week.  Anywho, the wedding was fabulous and everything went great.  Thanks so much to my mum and dad and FIL & MIL for throwing us such a beautiful wedding!!  Unfortunately I don't have one picture of my own to share with you, except this...

This is my wedding dress covered in blood.  Somehow Christian sliced his finger (possibly on the zipper) and bled out on my dress.  Nice work, Christian.   No time for a honeymoon right now but we got a little mini-moon at the Four Seasons in Philly (thanks Mum & Dad!).  Here was the view from our room onto Logan Square:

Some delicious chocolate covered strawberries they brought to us:

Once I get some pictures from the wedding I will post them.  Moving right along...

It was great to spend some time with my nephews after the wedding, and Lauren brought the girls by on Monday so we could say goodbye. 

On Tuesday Christian and I accompanied my mom, the boys, and Marti to Chick-fil-a.  Ironically it was the Giesa's first Chick-fil-a meal and Christian and I's last Chick-fil-a meal for awhile (or so we thought- we saw a chick-fil-a when we went to visit a friend 25 min away in Littleton, CO, yay!). 
I think Johnny and Dom enjoyed it...

On Wednesday Christian and I packed up our truck and hit the road to Denver.

Our poor parents are graciously storing all of our crap and our lovely new wedding gifts!  Here is a little taste of what they have to deal with for the next year...

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning we packed up the truck and got ready to hit the road!  Christian's friends dad was so kind to lend us a soft roof rack for the year which worked out great and allowed us to pack everything we needed to. 

 One of our biggest worries was traveling with our two beloved kitties Chicken and Stanley.  I had a feeling Chicken would be OK since she is usually very good in the car- never makes a peep.  I decided to buy this little dog tent for $7 at TJ Maxx and just throw it away when we got to Denver.  I put up the tent at Christian's house on Tuesday afternoon and Stanley hopped in and made himself at home right away...

The tent worked out really well, except that it was flimsy and hard to carry when we had to bring them into the hotel, etc.  On Wednesday morning we finished packing up the car, loaded the cats, and then had a few quick stops to make before truly heading to Denver.  Ironically, we went to Denver, PA to visit with Christian's grandparents.  We also stopped at his uncle's dental practice around the corner to say goodbye to Uncle Rick.  Then our road trip officially started... Denver, PA to Denver, CO. 

 (Don't worry he is not behind the wheel in this second shot...)

I told Christian I wasn't coming back to PA until this was in place of our bike rack...

Juuust kidding.... sort of.

Our first stop was  Terry and Shandra's house in Columbus, OH.  We didn't get there until about 8:30pm.  Terry and Shandra had a yummy dinner waiting for us, thanks guys!  They were also very kind to allow our kitties to stay with them.  Terry and Shandra have a new baby, Kealy.  She was just adorable (and so was their home)!  I wish we would have gotten to spend more time with them... but we got up early and hit the road for Kansas, City, MO (an 11 hour drive).  On the previous day's drive to Columbus the cats were SO good, no problems at all! They slept most of the time.

So we were hoping for the best on our drive to MO.  BUT Stanley got a little restless about an hour in and wanted out.  I tried sitting him on my lap (sorry mom):

He was fine for a few minutes but then got restless there, too.  SO, it was time for drugs.  We pulled into a rest stop and busted out the goods: Children's benadryl.  We gave him a smaller dose, which he immediately snarfed all over me (I don't think he cared for the bubble gum flavor).  We put him back in the tent and within a half an hour he was calm and was great the rest of the day.  They were pretty cute- Stanley and Chicken spooned most of the way. The drive was pretty boring.  Nothing to write home about. 

 

 

We saw A LOT of this....

When we got to Kansas city we got settled in our hotel room and set up shop for the kitties.  The hotel was great about us having the cats with us and didn't charge us extra or anything.  I did a bit of school work (the last thing I wanted to do after an 11 hour drive) and then we showered and headed out for some Kansas City BBQ.

We didn't have time to do a ton of research but this place was walking distance from our hotel and got good reviews.  It was a LOT of food, and we took at least half of it home with us, but it waaaaas yummy!

We just asked the waitress to bring us a variety of stuff.  We got baked beans, cole slaw and cheesy corn (mmmm) as our sides.  We were both PAINFULLY full when we left and could barely walk back to the hotel.  In the morning we decided to drug Stanley right away to save ourselves the trouble of having to stop to drug him.  He was lucky enough this time to wash down his bubble gum Benadryl with some delicious Kansas City BBQ! 

Next we were off to Denver!  Yay.  My brother wasn't kidding when he said it would be the most boring drive EVER!   Check out our radio scanning for some music (it did this for about 10 minutes until we just turned it off and plugged in the ipod:

We stopped for some DQ:

Stanley has some ice cream on his face....  Then mooooore driving...

I thought it was pretty funny the town between Kansas and Colorado is called Kanorado :) 
FINALLY, we made it to beautiful (colorful I should say...) Colorado:

We still had a ways to go to reach Denevr.

We were getting quite anxious to see our house at this point.... stay tuned for the next post: Our New Digs!