Peel-a-ton

Hello blog friends :) I'm interrupting my wedding posts to talk about another fun event. I hope you had a great weekend! Ours was awesome. It was in the high 70s and sunny both days here - unusual for Vermont in October.

I spent some much needed R & R time at the lake with my parents Friday night. I have been so busy lately that I have barely had time to see them! They were nice enough to keep Willow YET AGAIN so we could go on an adventure Saturday.

As for the big event...This weekend marked the first annual PEEL-A-TON. Matt's friend James organized a group of 6 couples for a fun trip to Montreal. The 6 guys biked from Burlington to Montreal (~100 miles)! They started at 7:30am on Saturday and actually beat us girls there by 4pm :) We rode in comfort up in the car (complete with travel goodie bags courtesy of Katie!) to meet them there.

Thanks so Lindsay for these pics....I stole many of them off facebook. I certainly wasn't there to capture the start at 7ish AM :)

Here they go!

About 8 hours later...they still looked pretty good.

The girls :)

A big thanks to Katie for organizing our big night out on the town in Montreal. It was so much fun!

xoxo!

Vermont 50

Wow - sorry for being a delinquent blogger. The blog is the first thing to go when life gets busy apparently!

We had a wonderful weekend with Meg visiting and spending time at the lake (I took NO pictures...can you believe it?) plus a big event for Matt (I took lots of pics of this so I'm sharing about it for now). I have lots more to share about the house but I'll get there eventually :)

SO. The Vermont 50 is a benefit for Vermont Adaptive Ski and Sports. It's a 50 mile mountain bike/ultra run. Matt signed up with a friend and trained for weeks! 50 miles off road on a bike sounded like torture to me but he was excited :)

I have posted a bit about this, but we've had a pretty rainy year. The spring floods plus Hurricane Irene, plus lots of other rain recently (excluding weekend days for the most part thankfully) led to pretty muddy conditions on race day. The day itself was gorgeous and sunny - 78 degrees - warm for fall in Vermont!

The race was held at Ascutney Mountain Resort in southern Vermont and it was beautiful to see all the leaves starting to change.

What a great event - a beer tent and live band entertained bikers/runners/spectators at the finish line.

Matt is still waiting for his official race photo.

The end of the course...

Cousin joined me for the day of fun :)

We arrived pretty early because Matt wasn't sure how long it would take them to finish. It took 7 hours and 50 minutes. WOW. He was happy with that time. We picked a spot to wait and camped out for about an hour...

While we waited, we had a few false spottings. I knew Matt was wearing a yellow shirt and black pants and I knew he had a white helmet, but it was difficult to tell from a distance. I took pics of every potential Matt coming down just to be sure :) Here are a few of the mistakes...

Finally we spotted Matt and Ilsley...

Matt posed for a picture - that is not a thumbs down signal according to him - more of a fist raised in victory. I was relieved he was in such good spirits. I wasn't sure how he would come across the finish after 50 muddy miles on a mountain bike.

The proud bikers - they weren't clean :)

Matt is convinced he needs a new bike now. What else is new?

Luckily the race organizers thought of everything...

Dirt...

All I could think was oh my look at those WHITE FEET! Yikes! Haha.

Fun times! I'm so proud of these guys - what an accomplishment. A special thanks to cousin for joining me too :)

xoxo

Weekend Update

Happy Sunday everyone! Did you spend a lot of time this weekend watching the Masters? I can't help but think about how different it looks there than it does outside my window. Oh well. We'll get there. It was a gorgeous weekend here in Vermont. The temps FINALLY topped 50 degrees, climbing to 62 today! We had plenty of sunshine as well. After spending a weekend moving, Matt and I were itching to get out and enjoy the weather.

Saturday we did some skiing.

You know it's sunny when you see something like this waiting in the lift line :)

We climbed to the top of the fire tower (at the top of the resort) to check out the views.

I hesitated a bit looking at the ladder and thinking about climbing in my ski boots.

It was worth it - the views were spectacular. We counted at least 6 other ski resorts in view! Wow.

Saturday night cousin and some other friends came over for cocktail hour to see the house. We got a good glimpse of how the house would feel with a 4 year old wandering around - we'll have to figure something out with all these stairs :) Wish I had a video!

Sunday we switched gears (hehe...literally) to spring and went for a bike ride. There's an awesome bike path less than half a mile from our new house so we wanted to check it out.

We also did some (desperately needed) work in our new yard :) It has three things in abundance.

Trees. There are 20 in the backyard alone. I can only imagine what fall will be like.

When you have 20 trees in your backyard, you also get acorns. We filled 6 large trash bags with acorns and leaves and finished about half the yard.

Sticks. Again, there are 20 trees.

One thing it doesn't have (yet) is grass....Hm. We'll have to wait and see.

We did manage to uncover some early signs of spring :)

xo!