Today I'm sharing that first visit to the Ice Castles for two reasons. First, because I never got around to sharing it before and I have lots of fun photos. Second, and more importantly, our first visit took place later in the day and we were able to experience the colorful lights on the ice structures. Our most recent visit was only during the day (I prefer the natural ice colors), so I wanted to share our earlier visit so that anyone planning on going later in the day or in the evening will know what to expect.
As you can see from the pictures above, we started our visited in the afternoon while the sun was still up, and ended it after the sun had gone down. Now, you may be thinking that we must've been there for three hours or so, but the sun sets pretty quickly here in Colorado in Winter, and our visit was in December, when the sun sets shortly after 4:30pm. We entered Ice Castles about 3:30pm and left not long after the sun set - mostly because once the sun went down, so too did the temperature and we were not acclimatized to Colorado Winters at that point! Had it been a little warmer we would've happily stayed much longer.
As you can probably tell from the pictures, the kids were much colder this visit than they were on our more recent visit. Scarves, beanies, multiple pairs of socks, thermals under their clothes, and hand warmers inside their mittens still weren't enough to keep these California kids toasty! It's amazing how quickly they've since acclimatized to the cold in the past 6 months that we've been living in Colorado. Mathilde wasn't too sure about walking around in the Ice Castles at first but luckily we had a handy toddler sled with us to drag her around in. She did hop out for a bit to ride the slides and climb through tunnels, but for the most part she snuggled up to her cuddly fox (which also happens to be a hoodie) in the sled.
Crawling through the tunnels and riding the slides were both hits with the kids. And with the adults too - although it was a tighter squeeze for me, especially with a backpack on my back and camera hanging off my front! It's amazing just how blue everything is when you're inside the ice tunnels.
As the day progressed the light started to fade and the sky grew darker. The sky and the ice started to blend into one. With the lack of sunlight providing warmth it also became much, much colder. So cold in fact that Kim and Lola left shortly after this to go warm up in the car while Ava, Mathilde and I continued exploring.
We took one last look around before the cold became too much and made out way to the exit where we met up with Kim and and Lola in the warm car. If you're not acclimatized to cold weather it certainly is rather chilly visiting the Ice Castles in the evening!
For more information and to book tickets visit https://icecastles.com/
To see our most recent visit to the Ice Castles click here.
For a list of my must have products when visiting cold and snowy destinations click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment