Taste of Fort Collins

As often as possible, we have been spending weekends in Fort Collins.  It gives us a chance to check on the house progress and get acquainted with our new hometown, gives Mom & Dad a break from our family of 3 plus the Labradiva living in their basement and, most importantly, gives Drew a break from making the dreadful commute back to Castle Rock every day.  Plus it's a super cool town and we always have a blast.  So when we heard that the annual Taste of Fort Collins was June 7-9 we marked the calendar, booked a hotel and headed up north.

Taste of Fort Collins is one of the biggest events of the summer in FoCo.  A 3-day festival featuring local food and beer, national bands and lots of other activities from a kid zone to eating contests to a craft fair.

We started the day by meeting some friends in nearby Windsor, CO where the fire station was having an open house.  One of our friends is a chief at that station and we knew the kids would love to see the equipment and hang out with the firemen.  From the kid-friendly obstacle course, to the firetrucks, ambulances and police cars to the free hot dog lunch to the jaws of life demonstration to the burning up of an old beater car it was a huge success.

A pause from the fire excitement to give Slapshot, the mascot for the Colorado Eagles hockey team, a five.

After all of the morning's excitement, we headed downtown to the festival where Jack and his buddy Brody (ironically wearing matching fedoras) worked up quite a sweat playing on all of the inflatable slides, bounce houses and obstacle courses.

Of course, we indulged on lots of delicious food (The Waffle Lab is quite possibly the most dangerous food truck we've ever encountered) and drank our fair share of local brews.  Even Jack recognized the logo for his Dad's new favorite by New Belgium.

Clearly, Fort Collins is well versed in the execution of an outdoor festival.  Despite crowds of over 30,000 people, the lines were extremely efficient, the bathrooms plentiful and even fairly clean and the trash/recycling readily available and never overflowing.  The meeting planner in me was more than impressed.

After pausing to listen to some live music for a bit, we decided to call it a day.  On our way back to the car, we walked through the kid zone again and despite being a bit timid earlier, Jackson asked to give the giant trampoline a try.  We were skeptical, but let him give it a shot.

He started slow, but got the hang of it pretty quickly and before we knew it he was quite the daredevil.

Cheers Fort Collins!  We can't wait to call you home.