A real park!

When we came home from Egypt we moved to Greeley CO.  A friend at the school I worked at is from there and she recommended Greeley to us. I don't think she really thought we would go but we did. We knew we didn't want to go to California or Utah and it met the criteria we had for where we wanted to live: within driving distance to CA, within an hour of a temple, nice fall/seasons, affordable on a teacher's salary. We didn't have jobs, or family or anything really to make us choose Greeley, we just needed a place to go.  After we lived there for a year Mark got his job in Colorado Springs and we have been here since then.  My favorite thing about Greeley that I really miss are the parks.  They have amazing parks with great walking/jogging trails and pretty lakes.  Its so nice and green and its a much smaller town so they feel so much more accessible. The year we moved to Colorado Springs the city had to cut budgets and the parks really lost out.  There are parks here of course but they are nowhere near as nice as most parks I grew up going to or that we went to in Greeely. On Saturday we went to a new park here and finally found some ducks to feed! They were stingy and didn't want our bread but we threw it at them  it in the water anyway. We couldn't tell if they were scared of us like bad things had happened to them other times or they just weren't hungry. Maybe they wanted jam on their bread? So while they ate very few pieces of bread we had fun walking around and playing somewhere new. Jared has been asking to climb the trees in front of our town home for the past few months but these town homes were built in like 2007-2008 so the trees are not real big yet.  On Saturday he finally got to climb a tree. It was a beautiful day (because I love cloudy days) and it was nice to go to a new part of town.  It is crazy to me how big Colorado Springs is. I can't really tell in my day to day life because I stay in like a 3-5 mile radius over by our house.  Maybe that is what we will do this summer, go check out the other sides of town the ones that are like 35 minutes away and still part of Colorado Springs.

 

There were 4 ducks in this little pond, not the prettiest pond I have seen but it did have ducks which was what we were looking for.

 

A real tree! The grass was my favorite part. It was so soft and green. We live on the far East side of town and its flat prairie without trees and weird rough spotty grass so I loved it over here.  We can see the mountains from our house of course but here I felt like I lived by them. This is what I thought Colorado Springs was like everywhere. Mark was super excited because there was a group of people playing ultimate Frisbee at this park. Before we left Egypt he was playing on an ultimate Frisbee team and played like twice a week. It is his favorite sport and he has missed it.  Two summers ago he tried to get a group together but only got like 4 people (on a good week mostly it was him and one other guy) so he didn't get to play. I kept bugging him to go ask the people if they met weekly to play and he finally did.  They do and he was welcome to come play.  So maybe he will have some fun this summer with ultimate Frisbee.