living the good life

Sorry we don't have any pictures to post. I left the usb cable for the camera back in Utah. So, I'll just have to describe how awesome our hotel room is. When I arrived in Vegas they upgraded me to a penthouse suite. It's freakin huge! 4 rooms, with a glass shower and a big jacuzzi tub. The shower is pretty fantastic as well since it has a total of 4 showerheads! 1 head is angled down like a normal showerhead, a second for your chest, the third hits your bum and the last gets your legs. They are also adjustable so that you get a massage. We've got a full kitchen that's way larger than ours with granite countertops and even a dishwasher. Flat screen lcd tv in the living room and another tv in the bedroom. There's a king size bed that's super comfy and windows that let you see the whole strip. So, needless to say we're enjoying ourselves. Normally we'd rather be camping, but once in a while a bit o' luxury is quite nice.

I think this is our third trip to red rocks together. It's spring time in red rocks and the flowers are all blooming. We've never seen so many colors here. There's deep greens on the vegetation with orange, yellow, and purple flowers all blooming. The climbing here is really a lot of fun. Saturday we climbed in a place called the Black Corridor. It's a really narrow little canyon with tons of sport climbing on each wall. There's probably 15-20 climbs on each side of the canyon. We picked this spot to climb since it was going to have shade for most of the day and also had a bunch of 5.9-511 climbs which are right in our range of comfort. We first got on a climb that I thought was a 5.10b and looked fairly straightforward. It turned out to be an 5.11b which gave us quite a run for our money. We both had to climb it 3 times to finally get to the top, but by the last time we had it pretty much nailed except for a stretchy move at the end. It took us about 3 hours to finally finish it... Much longer than we had planned. I also strained my ring finger on my right hand when I topped out the last time so I was done climbing for the day. Cassie did a really superb 5.10a which she promised was "a terrible climb" to make me feel better since I didn't want to make my injury worse.

Today we're making some breakfast, eggs and cantalope and we're planning on going trad climbing. We'll stick to the 5.6-5.9 range and take it easy. Could be another warm day with the temps hitting 90 in the valley so we'll be chasing the shade around. Tonight we're going to head to our favorite local sushi restaurant to have our anniversary dinner. Cassie flies out first thing in the morning and heads straight to work, while I stay in town to try and fix this very tricky bug that is giving me fits.

Sometime this week we should be able to post pictures from the weekend. Hope everyone is having an awesome weekend!

-matthew and cassie