Our Colorado Trip

We spent the last few days of August in Colorado Springs and Denver. D and all his siblings decided to surprise their oldest brother and show up at his promotion ceremony. On the 30th Captain JP was promoted to the rank of Major in the US Air Force. We found out a while ago that this would be happening, and made our congratulations to JP, but also let him know the Life was pretty crazy, so in all likely hood, only his Mom and Peggy would be there for the ceremony.
Imagine his great surprise and astonishment when at 8:00 the night before the ceremony, five siblings along with spouses and children show up at his door(total number of additional people: 30). It was great. He was speechless! Which is a pretty amazing feat! I said only five siblings showed up at the door because one sister (K) flew in to CO earlier that day with his Mom, Peggy and Great-Aunt Ruth.
Here he stands with Major Adams at the beginning of the ceremony on PAFB (Peterson Air Force Base). It was neat to hear the good things that were said about JP, that led to his promotion. And I know that the personnel there were impressed at the family show of support.

Here are the seven siblings (D, his twin Da, R, JP, K, Cr and Ch.
Here they are with their mom in front.
And here are 12 of the 14 cousins with Major Uncle JP.

Some of the other great things we got to do in Colorado Springs were go to Pikes Peak (BRRR it was only 40 degrees F there at the top at noon! The pic above is taken from the summit. They say you can see all the way to Kansas from the top of Pikes Peak.), visit Santa at Santa's Workshop (a Christmas/Santa themed kids amusement park at the base of Pike's Peak) enjoy the fantastic Colorado scenery (I loved all the different geologic formations and watching the zones change as we climbed higher and higher in altitude, past the tree line. We also loved all the wildlife we saw.) shop on base at the BX, go through the Garden of the Gods, visit the Denver Aquarium (not as extensive as Baltimore's but not too bad for an aquarium in a landlocked state!), listen to the BYU/Arizona game(BYU20, AU7), and of course spend lots of time with the family!
We had a great time, and of course Mimi said the now expected line as we left, "I don't want to go home! Why can't we live here in Colorado?" (Feel free to substitute any place that we have visited and she's probably said it!)