Day 2 - 11/27/2021

Day 2 - 11/27/2021

Today's plan was to get a Christmas tree - Doug fir pine tree for Akshay-Kishori's house. We started our short trip around 8:30 in the morning. Akshay-Kishori, US 3 -(Gaurav, Vijeta & Rohan), Alex & Sarah, and Chris & Steff - Akshay & Kishori's neighbors, we all were going to Buffalo Creek, CO where many people go every year to pick out their Christmas tree. We reached Buffalo Creek at around 10 AM. To my surprise Alex has brought stove and propane tank for cookout. Menu for cookout was bacon, hash browns & eggs. In 40°F (quite unusual for Denver for this time in a year), the bacon & eggs along with hash browns was a delight.

After everybody was stuffed with food, at around 12 PM we all started on to Christmas tree hunt. I had never done this before and there were many details that I did not know - for example, you have to venture at least 100 feet from the drivable road. There are many different types of pine tree that people use for Christmas tree - there is Balsam fir, Fraser fir, Cannan fir, Douglas fir and many more. We were looking for Doug fir tree for our Christmas tree. Akshay was looking for a tree about 8-9 ft. long, and Alex was looking for a bit longer. It was more challenging than I thought, since symmetry of the tree, barks, leaves, everything needed to be "PERFECT". After "evaluating" a few trees, we finally found "our" tree. Kishori took charge and sawed down the entire tree; Sarah did the same for theirs. Once the trees were cut down next task was to get them secured on Alex's truck. Good that Alex & Sarah do this every year, since without their skill & knowledge, it would have been Hours for us to strap down both the trees securely and start our trip back home.

There was some effort involved once we got back home. First we needed to wash down the tree and let it dry before we could get it in. To secure the tree, Akshay got the base that needed some assembly that we had to take care of. We initially thought we would need to support the tree with some padding, so we worked on making the padding, but as it turned out - we didn't need it, so that was that. We put up the tree - the first "real" christmas tree and started decorating it. Decoration is not really my thing so I let the "experts" take care of it.

All in all it was a very fun day of doing something that I don't know if I would have gotten opportunity to do if not for this group. Very tiring and productive day today. Looking forward to tomorrow since we start for Mt. Rushmore tomorrow.

can't wait for tomorrow. signing off for today.