Bear Encounters

For three years after we were married, we took one big trip per year. In 2004, we honeymooned in Maui. In 2005, we traveled to London, Edinburgh and Cambridge (this one to visit friends). In 2006, we took a trip to Italy and visited Rome, Florence and Venice. In our minds, the Italy trip was to be our last big trip for awhile because we just KNEW I would be pregnant any day. We love discovering new places and getting away from work for chunks of time (no matter how short), so it was hard to know we wouldn't be traveling for awhile. And as time went by, it got harder and harder because the reward for our sacrifice seemed further and further out of reach.

For my fellow bloggers, tell me what you have given up, no matter how big or small, to deal with IF treatments. What do you miss the most?

By the time summer of 2007 came around with no success, we were tired of putting off vacations for the "what ifs." Last September we were just gearing up for our first IVF cycle. We knew we couldn't go far from home because I was staring Lu.pron and it was the first time we were dealing with injections. But with the Rockies in our backyard, we thought we'd take a road trip through the mountains to places we'd never been before. We did a kind of loop, starting from Morrison (where we live), stopping in Buena Vista, Crested Butte, and Aspen along the way.

For today's photo(s), I'm posting some of the photos we took in Aspen. There are problems with bears throughout Colorado because of human encroachment on natural bear lands and because people just can't seem to keep trash (food) where it belongs. For some reason, Aspen seems to have more issues with bears than other mountain towns. While we were in Aspen, we discovered that the pedestrian mall was roped off with police tape because a momma bear and her two cubs were loitering on the mall. They took up residence in one of the trees, napped, and came down looking for food every once in awhile.

The authorities did not want to harm the bears, but they also didn't want people to get hurt. Their approach was to rope off a large enough area to give the bears their space and hope that they wandered off to safer ground in the middle of the night. Every once in awhile, one of the bears would wander a little too close to the perimeter of the police tape and they would shoot off a bean bag gun. The bean bags are meant to startle the bear, but not hurt them. Those guns sure are loud and they do the trick.

For two days these bears lived on the pedestrian mall in Aspen while people gawked at them and took pictures-B and I included. It was a little freaky to think about how close we were to these creatures in their "natural" habitat. Not in a zoo, from a safe distance with barriers.