Brocade & Vail

After 13.5 years in Colorado, I have finally done "real" skiing in Colorado - and it really kicked my tail. It's going to take me a week to recover!

Brocade sent Rick Prada, Linming, Rich and Francis to Fort Collins for two days of meetings on Thursday and Friday. We started by going to Restaurant 415 in old town Fort Collins for dinner on Wednesday night. It was a pretty good meal, complete with chicken & waffles. I did enjoy a really good ribeye steak, though.

The meetings on Thursday and Friday all went really well. In fact, we had a pretty crucial meeting on Thursday AM on the MLD IP and it cleared up a ton on the planning and execution for MLD verification and execution. Overall, I was very pleased with out the meetings went. The Goldeneye4 program is actually going pretty well, so that helps with the overall relationship with the customer.

Thursday night was dinner at Chimney Park Bistro in Windsor. Again - good food, but wow - I ate too much. Here's the yummy steak I had. The cut was called a "terrace-major" cut - part of the shoulder - very tender!

Friday, the meetings finished pretty quickly and we headed up to Vail for the weekend. I ran a few errands before heading up - both of which were centered around trying to deal with the side effects of the cold I've been dealing with. I've been pretty sick for over a week and I can't wait to shake this thing. I probably need to go the doctor and get an anti-biotic. I think it's moved to my lungs and its really killing me.

Anyway - Vail turned out to be really fun. We had dinner at the Blue Moose Pizza place, which was really good. We also played about 10 games of pool - with Ken Delgrande and I getting beat pretty hard by John Bognano and Rick.

Ken rented us a great little cabin/condo. It had 4 bedrooms and was a great place to "basecamp". It was nice that we were all together and could chat and coordinate things. Rick took this great photo of the view outside our cabin at sunrise on Saturday morning. Super awesome place - tons of snow.

Skiing was simple - we hit the slopes in time to get our ski passes and be on the 10th gondola up the hill. We skied from 8:30am until 4pm solid - with only a quick stop for beef jerky and water. My legs were killing me, due partially to a strained knee from the Trampoline park earlier in the day. I actually STANK pretty bad after skiing - I really worked hard.

After finishing, we watched some football before cleaning up and heading into town for some incredible food at "Flame" - I had an awesome Bison Ribeye. We did play some more pool, where Ken and I redeemed ourselves a bit!

On Sunday, we left at 5:45am so that I could make it back to church by 9am. It was snowing pretty hard in Vail, so the drive took longer than we expected. However, I did make it back and was only about 8 minutes late to church. Good thing church is in Windsor now!

I really enjoyed spending Sunday with the family. Amy let me take a 2-hour nap and then we played games and enjoyed the evening together. I also contacted all of the boys on Jantzen's basketball team. Practice starts on Monday night!

Here are some photos of the great trip to Vail! I'm glad the company paid for this trip - not sure I will make it back up for skiing in this area for a while!