The Afternoon Tea

Yesterday I officially kicked off my Colorado Trip by going to my Grandparents 55th wedding anniversary party (sans Nicole who is down in Wichita because her sister is due on Tuesday). Now this wasn't your ordinary 55th party, although I really do not know what the ordinary party includes, but this party was a afternoon tea. I would imagine that the average folk would not be that excited about a tea party, but I do like me some tea.

The teaing (which apparently already is a word) consisted of tea of my choice (I got house blend, which was quite good), lemon and apricot scones with the accompaniments of coddled cream, lemon curd, and blueberry jam. That was the first round. Next was a cool cantaloupe yogurt soup, which surprisingly tasted like cantaloupe and yogurt mixed together. After this they brought out a three tiered tray of snacks that ranged from a caramelized onion and pea souffle thingy, to cucumber sandwiches, to chocolate truffles to lemon meringue pie tars and baklava. Clearly a challenge was set before me. I tried everything and liked about two thirds of it, the high being a raspberry tart thing, the low being a chocolate truffle or "pure bitter cocoa in ball form". Lastly we had "dessert" which consisted of raspberry butter cake and strawberry sorbet. After filling up with more sweets than I eat in an entire year we talked for a bit and then headed out for the traditional post-55th tea party event, racing at Colorado National.

Since the car I was in was the first to leave, well the first to leave in a straight line to the races, we had ample opportunity to stop at the shops along the way to the races, which just ended up being a furniture store, because by the time we realized that we were ahead of everybody else by 45mins we were almost already at the races. Now a furniture store is not really my idea of entertainment. But luckily this furniture store (Furniture Row) is working on combating this idea. They had robots. They were just sculptures, but that didn't matter, they were still very cool. For the next 30 or so minutes Chris, Michelle and I went from robot sculpture to robots sculpture taking pictures and ignoring the population of workers asking if we were finding everything ok. It really is a good idea to have cool art in boring stores, because at the very least there is something to do in them. Although, I guess the average person doesn't go to a furniture store to blow time, but maybe they would if they all had robots in them.



After everyone else caught up to us we went to the races. The highlight of the night was a 100 lap main event for one of the classes of cars. But there were figure eights, stock car, modifies, late models and buses that raced. Yeah, like school buses. They only had five buses in the race and it was only for eight laps, but I discovered something very important: school buses can tip on two of three wheels for a long time before they actually fall over. I will spare you the details of the races last night but I can summarize: left turns, times a lot. Really the races were fun as always and I can not imagine a better way to end a 55th wedding anniversary but by going to the races. It was also a good way to end my first full day in Colorado.