The next morning, we set off from my house to Clarke's house in Elizabeth, Colorado. He rented and lived in the basement of his roommate's ranch house out in the country. His roommates had two horses, three dogs, and a cat at the time. Clarke's roommates were out of town for the weekend, and had taken the horses and dogs with them. I didn't load my dirtbike up to take to Clarke's, so the only real thing worth doing was playing Mario Kart. 

I hadn't played Mario Kart in several years up until that point, but I learned the ropes very quickly. Within just a few games, I had Mario Kart mastered, and kept beating my siblings. I played a lot of Mario Kart when I was younger, so I didn't have to take very much time to remember how to play it. Unfortunately, Ryder caught onto my strategies and started using them against me, which made it much harder for me to get 1st place every time.

In Mario Kart, there are boxes along the race course. In the original Mario games, those boxes had coins and power-ups in them. In Mario Kart, while there are still sometimes coins and power-ups in the boxes, there are also obstacle items to use against other players, such as banana peels and turtle shells, which would stop the other racers for a few seconds before they could get back into the race. I'd leave the banana peels behind in places they couldn't be seen until it was too late, such as just below ramps and around sharp corners, and I held onto the shells until I was just behind another player. Then, I'd throw that shell at them, and get ahead. Unfortunately, there is one shell in the game, the blue shell, that is programmed to only target the player in 1st place. 

Ryder would hang out behind me, even if he could get ahead of me, until he scored a blue shell from one of the boxes, just to piss me off. I'll admit, I did the same thing if I could, especially when we programmed the game so we'd only get shells from the boxes. But very quickly, I got sick of getting blue shelled and passed by Ryder just a few yards away from the finish line, and eventually I rage quit. I may have good strategies, but now that everyone knows them, I'm not the best Mario Kart player in the family anymore. However, I think I could beat Ryder at a real go kart race. 

I had a day to rest at home before we set off for the mountains. My mom and grandparents would join me and everyone else at the cabin. My grandparents wouldn't be skiing, and neither would my mom, but they wanted to see everyone and spend some quality family time with us at the cabin. I protested this a little bit, since I was told before that I'd get my own room, but now that three more people were staying with us, I wouldn't get my own space. I eventually just gave into it, and figured it would be good for me.

The cabin was just big enough to accommodate everyone, even though we had to share rooms. Ryder, Hannah, Jack, and Clarke all stayed in a room together with four bunk beds, my mom slept in the pullout loft bed, and I slept on a couch in my grandparents' room while they stayed in the king bed. It worked out, but I didn't get much alone time during the two days we were there, so I was pretty irritated and tired on the last day. 

I still had lots of fun though. The first night we were there, we stayed up very late playing cards. I won a few games, especially a game called Speed. We made Speed very fun. Usually, it's played with just two people, but since we had eight of us in total, we played with four decks of cards in one game. 

Speed is a pretty simple yet complicated game. Each player gets 6 stacks of cards, each stack containing 4 cards, facing down. In the center between the two players, there are 4 cards facing up. The goal of the game is to match each stack with all four cards of its value, which then you can get rid of. For instance, in order to get rid of a stack, you have to have all four queens, or all four aces, or all four 9's, etc, that are in a deck of 52 cards. The way you do that is by trading one card for another. Every card you trade must go through the neutral cards in the middle, even if you need to move a card from one of your stacks to another one of your stacks. Also, you can't hold more than one of your stacks at a time, and the stacks you aren't holding must be faced down. Jokers are not played in the game. You don't wait for your opponents to do anything. It's every man for himself in Speed, and only the players with the best and quickest strategies win. 

The game usually starts off pretty slow, but it gets very intense very fast, and with eight people playing with four decks of cards, it got even crazier. Everyone in my family is super competitive, including myself. While Speed is civilized between just me and my grandpa, it quickly devolved into a card game of sabotage with eight of us playing at once. I was glad that I had a spot at the end of the table between my grandparents, because otherwise I wouldn't have survived in the game as long as I did. 

I got some quiet time to myself after everyone got tried of Speed and we cleaned up (cards were pretty much everywhere but on the table). Everyone but me got in their swimsuits and hung out in the hot tub outside. I couldn't swim in the hot tub, since the warm, stale water was a perfect breeding ground for bacteria that could easily hurt me. However, I enjoyed having some time to myself in the cabin before everyone came charging back inside, steaming and soaking wet.