Camping and Working from Estes Park, CO

We finished our late night drive through Kansas with some incredible stars, and brilliantly watched Mars and Venus set in the West.

Leaving Hays for the long drive across the plains of Kansas and eastern Colorado, we hoped to make to Denver by Sunday evening. As flat as it was, there was quite some tranquility in the vast fields of waving grain and expired sunflowers.


There's something conflicted, passive-aggressive about barbed wire.


I jumped out of the car a few times to try and capture the spaciousness of this part of America.


Eastern Colorado was much of the same...


...which is why this demon-possessed Wendy's stood out.


But we reached Denver in the early afternoon. We poked around downtown Denver a bit, driving past the Coors Field (where the Rockies were playing someone), and the Broncos' stadium (which would be seeing action very soon). But having spent so much time in the previous weeks in Montreal, Boston, and Chicago, we were ready for the Rocky Mountains! So we blasted out of Denver after just an hour or so poking around.


We headed up through Boulder (where we hit an REI for a few provisions and an Bed Bath and Beyond for a new espresso maker), and made it to Estes Park in the early evening.


Estes Park is a quaint little mountain town. You might recognize the Stanley Hotel, as its the backdrop for the Shining!


Ill-equipped for a run-in with a crazed novelist or child ghosts, we opted to camp just outside of town, at a remarkable campground called Hermit Park.

We learned that Hewlett Packard once owned the park, but sold it to Larimer County recently. This is probably our favorite campground so far in the trip. We camped a Sunday and a Monday night, and the park was virtually empty. We drove up and back (in 4-wheel drive) miles and miles around the mountain to a secluded corner of the park where we had absolute perfect silence and no other humans for at least a couple of miles.

Oh, and there were rabbits everywhere. Kim thought this guy was really cute.

I took a walk and caught a nice sunset, and we settled in for a couple of chilly nights in the tent.

We rose early on Monday morning to make the long drive down the mountain and the short drive into Estes Park so that I could hole up and work from a Starbucks (and later Kind Coffees). I dropped Kim off at the Town hall on the main square to use the facilities (which were scant at the campground), as I waited, a small herd of elk walked right into town, scratching their itches on the town square statue and eating the flowers at the bank.

I drove around taking pictures while Kim was washing up. When she came out, she was on the other side of the elk crossing, and dared not walk through!

On Tuesday, two of my co-works (Al and Brian) drove down from Colorado Springs to work with me for the day. We did quite a bit of cross training, planning, and work that benefits from face-to-face interaction.

And after work on Tuesday, we drove about twenty miles toward Colorado Springs to a place called Oskar's Blues -- a blues brew pub with Cajun cooking -- talk about my kind of place! They're famous for Dale's Pale Ale. At Oskar's, we met up with another cadre of Canonical cool kids: Joey, Alex, Paul, and Elaine. They gave us plenty of advice on Northwest Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, and we speculated about the season finale of True Blood.

It was late by the time we drove back to our campsite, and we had to rise early in the morning, so we went straight to bed, no fire.

:-Dustin