Storm incoming?

If you've lived in Colorado or even just visited for any amount of time, you know that the weather forecasts are usually mixed up with the humor section in the newspaper - because it's usually wrong, at least in the foothills and Denver metro area. But up here in the "high country" it's usually a tiny bit more accurate.

That being said, I'm excited to see if we'll actually be getting this tomorrow:

If we do, it will be nice because I actually have a full day off--no work or rehearsal--and it will be nice to just get the house cleaned for my parents' visit this weekend. On the other hand, I didn't make it to the store to stock up on any foodstuffs...so I might have to enlist the help of the fiance when he gets off of work and make him go to the store while he's in town!

Welcome December!

"Tuesday Morning on Highway 34"

jackrabbit flapjack
crows pick at fur flesh and bone
cars - crows fly away

Happy Thanksgiving

From all of us here in Estes Park, a happy and safe Thanksgiving to you and  yours.

Here's Whiskey trying to "help" with the pie making effort.

Here I was complaining about the lack of wildlife...

...because it had been nearly a week and we hadn't seen any elk or deer up close. Got my wish today! It was so pleasant today and the elk were out and about in town. About 6:15 this evening I went to my rehearsal (for A Christmas Carol) and spotted two magnificent bull elk grazing in the grass near the bottom of my driveway.

I wasn't able to get a great picture, but you can see one of them here:

When I came home, I turned onto our road and almost drove right into the two of them! They were standing in the middle of the road just hanging out. I was too scared to try to drive through them so I sat there with my brights on for a minute and they stared back at me, a little perturbed that I was disrupting their munching time, and finally I honked my horn and it spooked them just enough that they cleared off the road and I was able to drive through. I'd heard horror stories from my dad's time living in Alaska about moose ramming cars so I was worried that I might provoke these two bull elk into the same kind of anger if I drove past them, but they were content enough to let me through.

How To Get Internet in the Boonies

I didn't think we were that remote when we moved here. We are within sight of state highway 34, surely we can't be that far from civilization. The KOA next door offers free wi-fi to its guests, so it can't be that inaccessible.

We found out otherwise when we tried to get internet installed at our house.

Qwest, the bigger of the 2 major service providers in Colorado, said that they couldn't service us because they haven't laid ground lines on this side of town yet. Comcast doesn't even service the city at all. So our other option was to go with a company called Airbits, which is a local company that provides point-to-point wifi. Basically, they have a giant mother router, and they send out little baby routers to your house. If your router (or radio box) can see the mother radio box, you can receive wifi internet.

So this is what we have now:

It's not terribly fast internet, at least as opposed to what we were used to having when we lived in normal civilization, but it's still internet. The verdict is still out on whether or not it's fast enough to stream our shows on Netflix, but I'm still grateful to have it.

And that's how you get internet in the boonies.

They Don't Tell the Tourists about the Wind

....which will be the title of my memoir, if I ever write one.

In any event, onward!

We arrived in Estes Park with our moving truck last Friday. In the last week we've been living here, it's been a period of adjustment. Adjusting to a house that was built in the 20s and therefore was electrified before the advent of 3-prong electrical plugs. Adjusting to the fact that it's just going to be cold in the house most nights. And yeah, adjusting to the fact that this is our front yard:

The other thing we've had to adjust to is the wind. My goodness does it get windy up here. Of course, we were lucky enough to get here just in time for some pretty severe winds (we had gusts of 100mph on Saturday) that are not always the norm. That storm did some pretty good damage to other parts of Estes, including knocking down some pretty big trees, but it seems that we are far enough down the valley that we didn't get the worst of it. It does seem to be pretty breezy almost all the time though, which is something that I'm still getting used to. The house we live in is a wood frame, and old, and it creaks a lot. It's an adjustment.

All in all we are almost all settled in. We discovered a crawl space under the house and were able to throw a couple of plastic bins with duct tape under there to save some room. We finally got cable installed yesterday, and although finding an internet provider was a bit of a challenge at first, we have our service arriving on Friday. It was a little challenging to be so cut off from the world for a couple of days. This is the first time I've gotten my computer online in almost a week. Almost everything is put away now, excepting the second bedroom which is being used as my office when we don't have visitors. The problem we're running across with that room is that the electric rung heater doesn't seem to work, so it's very cold in there unless the sun is shining right into the windows. The other problem is that we threw out two bookshelves that were in bad condition, and because I have a lot of books, most of them are still boxed and on the floor. So there's not a lot of navigation room in there as of yet. In fact, by and large, it still looks just like this:

But we were surprised to find upon moving all of our furniture into the place last week that we have more room than we were anticipating. We were also pleased to find that the closets have a ton of storage space above them (because we have a vaulted ceiling) so that helped a lot. 

It's a cozy little place, and I like it quite a lot. Best of all, my green children love it.

We haven't seen too much wildlife lately, although I suspect that because it's been so exceptionally windy, the animals are all bedding down to keep warm. I saw a positively enormous coyote at the end of my driveway this morning, although I wasn't able to get a picture. (I'm discovering that it's probably best if I carry my camera with me everywhere!) He was a good-looking guy, although he was favoring his left paw. According to one of the baristas at Starbucks, he's a local and has been injured for quite a while. We did get an up-close encounter with this handsome fellow on our way up the valley a couple of days ago:

We know that there are deer nearby, because we've found scat within 25 yards of the back door. Just haven't seen any of the culprits yet! As for our animals, they're settling in nicely. Brody, the dog, was a little skittish for the first couple of days, I think because the sound of the wind was making him nervous. We've been trying to get him used to being out on his chain so that he can spend some time outside (we don't have a fence and I worry about him running for it if he spots an animal), but so far all he's done if we walk away and leave him is cry. Another adjustment. The last couple of days he's been fine though. 

Whiskey, the cat, has been nonplussed from day one. He was in control since the moment he walked into the house, as you can see.

Estes Park has been very welcoming to us so far. The community here is beautiful and the people are wonderful. I've never felt so immediately welcomed. I think we are going to fit in very, very well here.

Until next time.

Welcome

Hi! Thanks for visiting. Whether you're here because I shamelessly plugged or because you're interested in learning more about Estes Park, I'm glad you're here. I'll get into more of what this blog is for in a moment--but for now I'd like to introduce myself.

I'm Stephanie, and this is my fiancé, Cameron.....(we're getting married next October)

this is our dog, Brody, and our cat, Whiskey.....

and this is the Conklin House.

Right now we live in Fort Collins, Colorado, but in less than a week, we are going to be residents of the Conklin House. And the Conklin House is in Estes Park, Colorado. In case you're unfamiliar with Colorado, Estes Park is northwest of Denver and sits right at the base of Longs Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park, and the Continental Divide. It's well-known for the elk that come right into town in the autumn and for the Stanley Hotel, famous for being fantastically haunted and for being the inspiration for Stephen King's The Shining. 

Estes is situated at about 7,500 feet in elevation. Its first white visitors settled in the valley in 1859. Most cities in Colorado, especially mountain cities, were founded because they had some useful resource like gold or silver. Estes Park was founded mostly because people thought that it was paradise. And let's face it--it is! How'd you like to have this be your front yard?

That's Longs Peak in the middle. The peak just to the left of it is the Twin Sisters. Longs Peak is a whopping 14,259 feet tall. Cameron and I are making plans to ascend it sometime next summer.

In any case--we're moving to Estes Park for work. Cameron is a store manager and just got the opportunity to come to Estes to manage a store here and of course we snapped it up right away, even though we just moved to Fort Collins about 5 months ago. I'm a writer, or at least I'm trying to be. And that means that I can do what I love from wherever I want. That being said, I thought it would be a great opportunity to write about the place that we live in now, since it just begs to be documented daily. "A Year at Conklin House" refers to the fact that we believe we'll only be living in this particular house for about a year, hopefully with the intent of saving some money and finding a different and bigger place to move to after that. We got the notice that we were moving to Estes Park so fast that we didn't have a whole lot of time to look for places, and on top of that, most rentals in Estes are considered "out of season" after Labor Day and as the demand decreases, so does the selection. We figure we'll have all year to nail down a beautiful place to spend some more long-term time in after this year.

But for the time being, the Conklin House it is. We know that it was built in 1925 in a "neighborhood" that was populated mostly by rich folk from out east who used Estes as their summer getaway. And that's where we figure it got its name from. We also know that most of the interior of it is way more recent than 1925, so we are thinking that it was completely renovated when the demand for long-term housing hit the market with people who wanted to move to Estes year round. I'm going to spend some time in the local library to find out who or what Conklin refers to, and potentially try to find out what the house looked like back when it was built.

So I'll be keeping this blog updated with general goings-on around and in Estes, our adventures in Rocky Mountain National Park (one of our favorite places and where we got engaged), all the beautiful pictures we can capture, and perhaps the history I come across--I love history and Estes is chock full of it. So thanks for visiting, please add me to your follower list, and enjoy the view!