Fly-Fishing in Colorado

Last week I took a trip to Colorado for alittle R&R and some fly-fishing.  It was a short trip, but it was alot of fun.  I flew into Denver Thursday morning to meet a friend of mine from Fort Collins, CO (Daniel Bort) at the airport.  Some of Daniel's family lives in Denver, so we went downtown to meet  them at The Falling Rock Tap House for lunch.  It's a little hole in the wall joint in Denver LoDo with a huge beer selection and great hamburgers.

Daniel and I loaded up on groceries and then made the 2 hour trip up the mountains from Denver to Grand Lake, Colorado, a beautiful vacation town just on the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park.  There's an amazing and very generous woman I knew when I pastored a church in Golden, CO who owns a beautiful lakeside cabin in Grand Lake.  She let us crash there for a night.

In the morning we met a fly-fishing guide named Jeff from Grand County Fly Fishing.  Jeff's a really interesting 40-something guy, who lives in Grand County with his family, leads fly-fishing trips, rafting  trips, and does ski patrol in the winter . . . pretty much my dream life if I wasn't in ministry.  It was a pretty cold, windy day, and the fish weren't biting much, but I caught one, and Daniel caught 5 or 6, so it was worth it in the end.  It's amazing how fast 5 hours fly by when you're wading in a river casting flies.

When we were all fished out, Daniel and I headed down the mountain back to Denver to stay the night with another buddy of mine, Quinn.  We had dinner with Quinn and his fiance at Hacienda Colorado, an amazing Mexican restaurant in the Denver area, and then went back to Quinn's house to enjoy a few beers, a few guitars, and some good conversation.

The next afternoon, we had lunch downtown, had some great coffee at Peet's, said our goodbyes, and then I flew back to Chicago.  It was only a 2 day vacation, and we packed alot of stuff into those two days, but it was alot of fun.