Family reunion in Colorado

There's nothing like 20 of your closest relatives congregating in your adopted home town to mess up a person's blogging rhythm. It's actually been over a week now, but it's taken this long just to recover and get back to the regular rhythm.



From July 3 - July 12 there was the largest congregation of Schoenbergs pretty much ever. My mom, Oma as the younger generation calls her, is the matriarch and it was her idea to get everyone together. It would have been great to wait a year until our cabin was done, but when your 82 year old mother asks everyone to get together, it's hard to tell her to wait. Next was the 6 "kids" from my generation - Jannie, Susie, Steve, Ed, Jeff, and me - spanning 15 years with me as the baby of the family. All of us are married except Steve and all brought our spouses except Jeff (Priscilla had to work), so Don, Allan, Susan, and Alex added 4 more. Then the younger generation of 10 kids ranging from 28 to 6 - Lisa, Melanie, Sam, Zack, Hannah, Holly, Leah, Allison, Charlie, and Aidan. A total of 21 all in all. Amazingly complete except for Priscilla. Susie's friend Amy, who lives in Ward was the one exception - we'll just photoshop Pris' face onto Amy's body in all the group photos.

People came from Illinois (Urbana and Roscoe), Wisconsin, Missouri, Germany, California, Connecticut, and Texas. Some via plane, but most via car - taking interstates 70, 80, and 90. Once here lodging was distributed between the Boulder Outlook, Nederland Best Western, Arapahoe Ranch Cabins near Eldora, the Sundance Inn south of Ned, camping on our Land, and bunking at Amy's house in Ward. People arrived from July 3-6 and left July 8-12.

Trying to figure out "The Plan" was the theme for the week. Some options had been presented prior to everyone getting here, but there were always the details to figure out: who was coming, who wasn't, what car, what time, what would we eat, etc. This was all made more difficult by an almost complete lack of cell phone coverage. During the days there was a fair amount of splintering into different levels of activity and non-activity. But at night we were able to get an almost complete group together almost every night. Across the week we did a lot of hiking, but also rafting, horsebackriding, swimming, shopping, a parade, fireworks, eating, and a trip to the rodeo.

A pictorial rundown of the week is here: http://picasaweb.google.com/tkdelf/SchoenbergReunion2009?authkey=Gv1sRgCOK1lL2htqScxQE#. More individual blog posts to follow on some of the individual activities.