The Beautiful Country Around Aspen, CO

We’re back!!!!! Hubby and I took a trip up to the Aspen area to visit Liam, who is spending the summer at the Aspen Music Festival. We found this cute cabin to rent in Redstone, which is about an hour away from Aspen:

Hubby is a fly fisherman, one of the big attractions of this little house is the backyard:

(Those are old coke ovens in the background.)

There’s a marble quarry a few miles away, so there’s lots of marble statues around! (That’s the odd white shape in the sunset picture above.)

Here we are documenting the fact that we are indeed on vacation:

(Our selfie game is not strong…)

That’s the Crystal River running through our backyard! Here are some pix of Andrew fishing in the Crystal River on our way to Aspen:

(Hubby caught a few fish each day, I was only able to capture a couple on camera. This is all catch and release area, so I had to be in the right spot, which didn’t always happen…)

Aspen Music Festival has concerts going on pretty much every day. There are 4 orchestras, as well as the opera orchestra, and a contemporary ensemble. Here he is from an opera performance a couple weeks earlier:

The students of the festival rotate through all of them, when we were there Liam was rehearsing with the Contemporary Ensemble, so we didn’t actually get to see him in a performance, but we went to a couple of performances anyway!

Here’s the “tent” where the big concerts are held:

Liam is studying the Per Brevig this summer. Per was Principal Trombone of the Metropolitan Opera for 26 years, and taught Andrew at Oberlin over 30 years ago. (Andrew also did Aspen Music Festival for a summer!)

Liam was able to get away for a day and hubby took him fishing in the Roaring Fork, which is downstream from the Crystal.

We spent one day on the Aspen Music Festival and School campus, it is stunning!

 

Andrew gave a talk at Per’s weekly master class, and then all the trombones played some trombone choir music conducted by Per:

We got to hear a little of Liam’s Contemporary Ensemble rehearsal before we left:

We spent the final day traveling up the Crystal River to Beaver Lake:

All too soon it was time to pack up and head south, back to dryness and HEAT! (Although we did miss some actual rain and humidity, quite a rarity for a summer in Redlands). Liam’s got 2 more weeks and then he heads straight to Nashville to start year 3 at Vanderbilt. 

It was a lovely time, but it wasn’t long enough. Hubby has had an exhausting year, and I’m right there alongside him. I’m grateful for the time we spent away, but mindful of the fact we aren’t fully rested and recovered. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do about that yet, but I’m thinking about it….