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How did you spend summers as a kid? What are some of your fondest summer memories as a child? I think you can wrap those together.

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Yeah, so for me summers were... Well, I don't... he's not ready yet. That was... oh, were you? Oh, sorry.

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Summers for me, you know, we did... your mom and I have talked about this. It wasn't so much organized stuff. We could have done swim team in Boulder, but my mom didn't want to get up that early.

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So we didn't do swim team at the little pool in Martin Park. It was mostly just ride around, play with your friends, play army, run here, run there, get skinned knees and things.

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I did go to YMCA day camp up in Netherland. And then when we lived in Houghton, we went to Isle Royale and Boy Scouts. That was fun.

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We always had big family camping trips, but it was not organized stuff other than the Greenstone Trail hiking with the Scout troop or other Boy Scout camping things or family camping things. We'd come out to Colorado, go up on the North Fork of the frying pan.

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When we lived in Boulder, when we lived all over the place, when we come out to Colorado, we'd go up there. And you girls remember going to the... forget what anniversary of the Cap K Ranch on the frying pan was.

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And that's kind of how we got hooked up with that place. Didn't do anything, you know, in Houghton, it was ride your bike out to Lake Superior and screw around.

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Or we'd go over this one family. The Fentons had a vacant lot. And Fenton Field was where the morning softball games would commence.

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And you might be on team A in the morning and team B in the afternoon. And it was a never-ending cast of little kids that would rotate through this sort of ongoing game that would pause for lunch and then pick back up.

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And they did have real Little League and neither my brother or I were particularly gifted baseball type players. We were more hockey and football.

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So that was a big deal. But then they had for the non-true Little Lakers, they had this thing called Summer League, which was for the rest of us. And I don't think my brother did it, but my parents urged me to do it to get, you know, got to get these kids out of the house.

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So I would do Summer League and the PE teacher from the school was the commissioner, referee, umpire, general manager. And he would adjust the teams. He'd have trades. So he would make it more even.

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So that was pretty fun. That was my baseball career. And like Debbie's brothers, which were more serious baseball players. What did you do?

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Well, as Jeff said to Summer, when you're real little, it was just free play. And, you know, I had the benefit of living on East Virginia, which was a lot of young families.

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And so we were just outside playing all the time, out all at night, eating dinner at someone else's house. Hide and seek.

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Kick the can, hide and seek, you know, just playing, doing all sorts of stuff. Even then, and you think about it, we moved there. I was not, I was nine when we left that house.

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But I would walk with a friend from my mom and dad's house on East Virginia to Colorado and exposition to, um, oh, so I'm drawing a blank of the drug store. What's it called down there?

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Codals. Codals drug.

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No, Codals drug. Codals drug.

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And we would walk there a little girlfriend and I, and so we're eight, nine years old. And it's kind of like walking from our house here on Grandview to Wassam High School.

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That would be somewhat the equivalent of the distance. And we'd walk by ourselves and it was not a big deal.

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We could just play and do free stuff like that. Later on, I guess I had dance classes. They finally put me in dance classes because they had so many activities for my brothers like baseball.

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They didn't do football, but they did baseball. They were in scouts.

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I was a brownie too. I don't remember much being a girl scout, but I was a brownie.

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I did go to Girl Scout camp, um, maybe twice, but, um, some reason that didn't stick dance. I did a lot of dance, um, tap dance, baton twirling.

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Baton twirling was one of my very favorite things. In fact, I still have my legitimate weighted baton.

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It's very different than just a cheapy baton. Um, so I liked that a lot.

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Um, but otherwise really it was a very different experience. Yeah.

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I would agree that in those days you could, you know, little kids know he was scared to death. The bad guys are going to suck you up.

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You, you learn stranger danger at an early age and never really had a problem with that. And I remember walking from where we lived on Berkeley Avenue down to the, uh, shopping center right across from Kittridge, which that's got to be a ways, half a mile, three quarters of a mile with my little brother.

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And we take our money and go down to probably Hodel's drug and buy model airplanes that we would then go home and make a sticky mess out of. And nobody worried a lot.

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And we would go over to the school and play for hours, play army, play whatever, ride our bikes all over the place and in Houghton. I was in middle school, sixth, seventh, eighth and part of ninth.

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We would literally like ride 10 miles down the road from town to the, to Lake Superior. And we'd all was really cold.

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So it didn't swim much, but we'd wait and fool around, have a snack and then we'd ride home or we'd build big bonfires on the beach. Never worried about a thing.

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Summer vacations. It was always for us driving to Minnesota.

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And so we would be gone maybe two weeks. It was always in August and loved the driving.

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It was a lot of fun. It was a two day drive.

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And my grandparents then in Minnesota, Mankato, they'd rent a cottage on Lake Washington and we'd go out there and we'd been doing it for many, many summers. So we got to know other people that had cottages there.

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We had a boat at our cottage. We had a wood canoe.

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Other people had boats. So we learned a waterski.

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We did cornbakes and all sorts of things. Just had a blast at the cottage on the lake.

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My grandfather still worked every day, but he would drive out to the lake house in the evening. I remember having grown up in Colorado, we didn't have screened in porches.

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And I remember in Minnesota, every porch was screened in. And as a young child, you're kind of oblivious to heat and bugs.

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And you know, Minnesota, this is August. Heat, humidity, but she didn't really know that.

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And what I finally learned as I was older was those screened in porches were needed in Minnesota because of all the mosquitoes. But she didn't really think about that as a little kid.

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You just go there and my dad always drove the boat for waterski. My mom grew up on Lake Washington.

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She was actually a lifeguard. And quite a distance from our dock was a floating island.

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And so she taught us how to swim out to that island. And one of her lessons is when she was lifeguard and she had to learn to swim across the lake and back.

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And there were little fish in that lake that would come and kind of like, hi, I'm here. You're invading my property.

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But it was a lot of fun. There was only one summer growing up that we didn't go to Lake to Minnesota.

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We ended up going to Minnesota that winter. And I'll tell you, that's a whole different experience, how cold and freezing.

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But again, equally as fun because there's snow, we went to bargaining and did all this same stuff with the same friends throughout the lake. Only we did it in town.

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And we ended up going to California that summer. And it was so much fun.

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We went to a baseball game at Candlelight Stadium. I always thought summer was warm.

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Candlestick Stadium. Thank you. Candlelight. Candlestick.

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I thought baseball games were supposed to be hot and warm. Well, Candlestick Stadium is like being in an iceberg.

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And we hadn't really brought warm clothes, but my dad's sister, Pat Lloyd, was there. And so they got close for us.

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We went to Disneyland. Oh my gosh, that was so much fun.

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We went to Knott's Berry Farm. And then my dad, we had to go to Los Angeles because true to form.

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Remember my dad's clown. And where can you get the best clown stuff?

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Is it on the main drags on Los Angeles? So he went and had his clown shoes made.

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He had a special wig made for himself. He had his costume made there.

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So we had to frequent that store. And then kind of like Christmases, my dad had to take us to these nice stores.

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So he took my mom and me. I don't know what my brothers were doing then, but we went into a shoe store and we probably bought seven to 10 pair of shoes.

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And then we went into, I don't know, it could have been Nordstrom, some nice shop that we didn't have in Denver. And he bought some fancy clothes for us, some sweet things.

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I remember this red and black plaid jacket with a, it was wool and with Kulac shirt. And it had kind of a beanie cap that was the red and white, red and black plaid too.

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And I thought that was pretty cool back then to have that outfit and a few other outfits he bought. So again, he liked to be generous when he, when you were shopping and doing stuff like that.

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So we came home with, I think we, I don't remember, I think we flew. No, we drove because we had to fit all that stuff in our car is shoes.

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But it was a very fun trip. It was nice to have a summer trip different than Minnesota.

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But then we went back to Minnesota. We also went to, we'd always go to, I wouldn't say we went to Mount Rushmore a few times too on the way to Minnesota as well.

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So those are my fond memories. We did a lot of family week long, two week long soirees and the station wagon and camping.

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Yellowstone, Tetons, Banff, Jasper, Montana, Glacier. That was a really good one.

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So we saw lots of wildlife kind of got into that. And went to Isle Royale and Houghton, not only on the scout trip, but the family took the little ship from Houghton over to Isle Royale.

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We spent like a week, a week there and rented a little boat. And my dad and I went out around the tip of Isle Royale and back up the other, up another inlet.

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And that was kind of scary for me because I'm not a huge waterman. And it was a little boat with a little motor.

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And I was like, I don't know, I want to be on a Nimitz or a Gerald Ford class with a hornet to go home. So we did a lot of camping stuff that way.

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When I was in high school, my friend Lisa Thiem, who my grandmother had introduced me to, had a church group and they were going on a boundary waters trip. And so she invited me to come up to Minnesota to do a week on the boundary waters.

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And that was a lot of fun just being out there and the wild picking fresh blueberries and canoeing our way through all this new territory with nothing else around you. We had a lot of fun.

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When my grandparents would come out, sometimes they came out in the summer and we'd go to, actually, yeah, I guess it was both of my grandparents. I was trying to remember if it was just my grandfather, but not.

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We'd go to a little place called Alpine Village Inn. It's on the Allens Park side of Estes Park.

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And we'd go up there. I think Erin or Lauren, you and I have driven by this place.

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The buildings were still standing. They look like Swiss chalets.

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And we'd horseback ride and do hikes and just do all sorts of fun things. We had a big, I think it was a mercury, this red car, huge.

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I mean, it's as big as a tank. You had always a big giant sedan.

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And it was convertible, red car, white convertible. And I think seven or eight of us could fit in that car.

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And the trunk, you could sleep three or four people in the trunk. It was that big.

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And so we would take that car and have the top down. And it was a lot of fun.

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Another one of his toys. We camped in Rocky Park a lot too because it was so close.

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What was your favorite family vacation as a child? What made it so memorable?

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I think we've shared enough. Yeah, I think that's it.

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Camping various national parks. Because vacation, when you ask about what the summer was like, summer was vacation.

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Rarely did you take a vacation during the school year, work year? It was really summers were about vacation.

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Yep. They were, you know, it was free play.

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And then there was some organized family trips. And for me, it was national parks to the north.

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For me it was national parks to the north. Bye everyone.