Wood Family Goes West 2020: Day 11

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Melissa

The first drama of the day: Lillie lost her second tooth. (Well, I pulled it to be exact.) My tough-as-nails daughter can take vaccines, bee stings, and COVID tests without shedding a tear, but tooth-pulling is another story entirely. I begged her to let me pull it. It’s been dangling for several days. I didn’t want to lose it in the car when we didn’t have a way for her to rinse out her mouth. She cried for 20 minutes to me in the bathroom because she was afraid that the boys would call her Snaggle-tooth. Yep. She wasn’t afraid of blood or pain; she was afraid they would hurt her feelings. I gathered all the boys–including my husband–at the base of the stairs and made them faithfully promise that they would not tease her once she widen the gap in her mouth from one tooth to two. Then I told her I would punish them if they broke the promise. Her: “Even Daddy?” Umm… Me: “Yep. I won’t talk to him if he teases you.” Seriously. This is real life, Folks.

Kevin and I ran downtown before checkout time to get coffee. This coffee was SO GOOD. (I drink good coffee, y’all, but I think that this was better then the coffee we had in New York City.) Kiln. They even had really great swag. I picked up an espresso pottery mug for myself.

We left Grand Junction at 10 AM and headed to Vail. Our Airbnb in Vail was in a large resort community. We stayed in a small basement apartment. There were two bedrooms with queen beds and two futons in the living room. We dropped off our bags and went to explore the property.

They had a day-pass for a gondola ride to the top of a large mountain. During the winter, it’s a ski slope. In the summer, bicyclists got dropped off near the top and rode the winding trail down. There were lots of families here, but we just felt like no one was friendly here! The people that worked at the resort were nice enough, but none of the guests interacted at all. I didn’t feel like it was COVID related, either. Other places that we have gone on this trip, we have always found someone that we could interact with…

We took the kids swimming at the resort’s heated pool. That was one of my goals for the day; I knew that it would probably be the only chance that we would get to swim on the trip. By the time we got cleaned up from swimming it was almost 8:00. NOTHING at the resort was still open for dinner! We were shocked. Chicago’s Pizza, a little dive joint, provided a sweet spot for dinner. The owner was working in there by herself and jamming out to Christian music. We found a kindred spirit there immediately.

For the most part, though, we didn’t love Vail. It was beautiful. Don’t get me wrong. We just found the guests very NOT-friendly. Maybe this was just due to our limited time there. If we were to ever come back out West to ski, we would probably choose the Driggs area. Small town. Nice people.