colorado - the first 24 hours

Since Jake has to make time for studying every day on our vacation, I decided I'd use this time to get stuff ready for medical school ... and blog about our first day in beautiful CO. 

Last night we arrived in Vail about 4:30 (ten hours from Omaha - with plenty of stops). We checked in, walked around, grabbed food at an Italian place called Vendetta's located in the Vail village (which is right outside the condo).  I ordered the chicken parmigiana and Jake ordered a pizza. The place itself is a nice casual restaurant, we were seated inside, but because of the open windows, it really felt like we were outside. We really enjoyed the flavors of the homemade tomato sauce on both of our dishes. The pizza was also preferable to our tastes because it didn't have too much sauce on it. The restaurant seemed to be busy the entire night, they did have a fun pizza bar area that was open until 2:00 AM. 

Afterwards, we walked around the area and came across a sign outside The Shakedown Bar that said "Free keg and Live Music," so how could we pass up that. We went down a flight of stairs and saw a wide range of late 20-something-women and then men in their 30s-50s. And then there were us...and the late 60-something-year-old woman in the corner with her grandson?. As we sipped on our glass of free Coors, we stuck to the wall (as wallflowers do) and watched these people dance awkwardly. 

Then I met this lady with a chihuahua, and she went on to tell me about how all that I need to do to get Minnie allowed to come everywhere with me is to go to a doctor and tell him [or HER] that I have PTSD or anxiety and I can get a prescription. The 3 month old puppy crawled over to me (a stranger) and hid behind my back, poor thing probably shouldn't have been there. We had our one beer, listened to two songs from the band, and then were home by ten (to be fair, it was 11 central time). Jake slept fine adjusting to the altitude and I did NOT. I was constantly waking up.

Today we took the day off to acclimate, relaxed, shopped, and explored. The Vail Village and Lionshead area has beautiful European-like architecture, great dining, and fun shops to explore. Here are some pictures of the village.

These people are already SO pumped about the alpine world ski championships happening here this winter. 

We also enjoyed looking around at the artwork and other scenery. 

Here's some views of Vail mountain, hopefully we'll head up there and explore more tomorrow.

We were getting hungry as we kept walking, and even though we had sandwiches to eat back at the condo, we decided to walk out to Lionshead and try this Blue Moose Pizza that many people were talking about. The USA Today even ranked it as on of the top ten places to eat at Vail. View the rankings here. 

The pizza was good, but the atmosphere was better. We had a view of the gondola up the mountain and mountain bikers biking down it. The Lionshead area is even more European-like with its bistro restaurants and flowers-in-the-windowsill lodging above those.