We bought into this condo in October 2015. Curt had started his annual challenge of lining up places to stay for our visits to Breckenridge. He usually tries to get our December trip reserved before November and then our Jan/Feb trip by December. While he was looking for locations, he searched out the street address of a condo we stayed at in April 2015. we like the area and it was the first time we stayed on the mountain at a true ski-in, ski-out location. One of the options he found showed up on Zillow as being for sale and did a little more digging around. He knew the price had to be wrong because this place was actually affordable. What he discovered is the unit was a fractional ownership and you would actually be buying a 20% interest that has 10 fixed weeks throughout the calendar year. The crazy thing is that these 10 weeks included the times we like to go to Breckenridge. There were even 3 weeks in the summer and we had never been in the summer. This seemed like a great deal to us. In total, 7 of the weeks are good options for us while 3 weeks we know we probably won’t be able to use. I am a tax CPA and those 3 weeks are close to tax deadlines so it will be hard to use them. The good thing is we have a management company so we can rent out the condo when we’re not using it during our weeks.
Our background is that I’ve got a birthday in mid-December and Curt has a birthday in mid-January. We’ve found mid-December is a really good time to be in Breckenridge. The rates are reasonable (usually pre-winter season) and the lines are short. Curt’s birthday falls very close to MLK Day, which because it is a holiday, the rates are higher and the lines are longer. So we pushed his birthday trip back to the end of January or early February. Our aim was to be in Breckenridge for the Super Bowl.
Our trips were usually 4 day trips that went Friday through Monday. We’d leave Austin early on Friday, fly to Denver and rent a car. While we were at the car rental, we would get our boards ready, change into our riding gear, and then head off to Breckenridge. On the way out of town we’d stop at Apple Jacks and King Supers and then take I-70 to Breckenridge. We could usually get all this done and still make it to the mountain by noon, sometimes even 11 am. To leave on Monday, we’d do the reverse. We would pack up everything and leave a change of clothes for the plane at the top of our luggage. We’d ride until 2:30 pm or 3:00 pm and then call it a day. We would try to change at the mountain and break our boards down before we left. We found that Keystone and A-Basin are easier to do this than Breck so our last days usually were at one of those 2 mountains. As a side note, we also liked ending the trip going over the continental divide on Loveland Pass using CO-6.
Now that we have the condo, we don’t have to rush to get to the mountain and we can enjoy ourselves. Plus, while we are there, we don’t have to feel like we have to be on the mountain all day long. We have the freedom to take a day off the mountain and explore the town or some other outdoor activity.
Anyhow, that’s how we got to this point. We’ll use this blog to share out insights into Breck.