A busy couple of days lately. I've been running around like crazy the past couple of days going to Longmont to pick up the canoe, and then grocery shopping and picking up last minute items. Along with that has come more visiting with friends, including dinner and lunch with several of them.
   High on the list though was picking up my good friend Rima late Thursday night. It has been nice having her here in town and we have certainly been busy running around since she arrived. We had a wonderful dinner out last night with our friends George and Marge. They took us to one of our favorite restaurants, The Perfect Landing, at Centennial Airport, where you can watch all the private planes and jets take off and land while you eat. But they also have some of the best food around town, such as Rima's Beef Wellington, cooked medium rare and wrapped in this puff pastry that is to die for. I had something a little different, Seafood Shepard's Pie. Lobster, crab, scallops and whole shrimp baked in a dish with a puff pastry top and a cream and cognac sauce. Oh my god was that ever good.
   Today was more food as we went out for a lunch of Mexican food with Tom and Donna before going over to the Denver Botanical Garden to walk around. The gardens themselves are a wonderful treat, but right now they have numerous Dale Chihuly glass sculptures scattered about the grounds and in amongst the flowers and plants, and they are just stunning to look at. We spent more than a few hours there and took lots of photo's which I hope to be able to post at a later date.
   But we were running late at that point as we had one more grocery shopping trip to do for our up coming canoe trip, plus we had to stop by some friends house and pick up a bunch of water jugs that they had been freezing for us.
   We got back to Tom and Donna's after 10:00 and spent about 30 minutes packing up our coolers and putting all of our food in order. Tomorrow morning 9 of us will be leaving for a 13 day canoe trip down the Green River in Utah. We will put in on Monday morning about 5 miles below the town of Green river and paddle and float about 120 miles down to it's confluence with the might Colorado River. At that point a company out of Moab will pick us and our gear up in one of their 30' long jet boats and carry us all the way back up the Colorado River to a take out near the city. A night there in Moab to clean up, have a meal out and sleep in a real bed before driving back to Denver on the 7th of September. So right now I need to finish this up and get some sleep. I'll be back in about two weeks, hopefully with some good stories and even better pictures.


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