One Month Down...

Looking for rain, same as Tucson...

...three to go.

It seems utterly impossible that we’re a quarter way through our cabin stay.  I have this visual of me grasping a large rope with my heels dug in hard, but being pulled along in spite of my best efforts.  The days reel by, evaporating hour by hour, to the point that I sometimes feel I must have fallen asleep for some of it (and we do take the occasional nap) -- how can it be 4 PM?  

How we spend our time:

Projects and Reading

Now that we are mostly sorted out and stowed away, less work and more play becomes a reality.  Or projects that veer away from being chores and are more like fun -- like forest clearing for my husband, or sewing projects for me.  And there’s always a stack of books to be read, and we’re doing quite well at that.  My two favorites of the half dozen or so I’ve read so far were Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell (fanciful and fascinating) and a real knock-out by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham (for The Hours), By Nightfall.  We are now card-carrying members of the Rampart District Libraries -- their card has a panorama view of Pike’s Peak -- and can use either of the libraries, a smaller one in Florissant and a big one in Woodland Park.  And get this...we are of an age that we have “earned the right to be late” and pay no fines.  Nice, especially since it’s the better part of a hour to get to the library and we’d never make a special trip just to return books.

We love the local libraries -- and these two books especially!

Family and Friends (and hiking and beer making)

Happy Birthday Marc!

We had our third set of house guests.  Our friends from Tucson who moved to Colorado Springs four years ago, and who’ve hooked us up with everything from our dog (a rescue) to storage and hauling of our cabin things, came up recently for an overnight.  They’d come up in their Range Rover New Year’s Eve for the night (not that any of us were up to ring in the New Year) for sub-zero weather and a foot of snow on the ground (dedicated friends).  This time the weather was lovely, which was a good thing as it was Marc’s birthday.  We ate all our meals outside and took a long hike with the dogs; then Marc and my husband brewed beer, an ESB.  They filled us in on their Search and Rescue work before heading home for a few hours sleep before reporting for duty up at 11K+ feet on Pike’s Peak for some crazy car race called the Hill Climb (just in case someone went OFF Pike’s Peak).  An hour and half or so away, we’ll see lots of them this summer.

Can we see the cabin from here?

Shady chat during a hike rest

Taking the dogs to water along Little Turkey Creek

Even with everyone having five acres up here, neighbors are a big part of cabin life.  Most folks don’t have phones, so we’re never surprised by drop-in visitors.  Just taking a long walk here is a social experience if you don’t head straight into Pike National Forest.  We’re planning to walk all the roads here, roads named by my husband’s father, Fred, before summer is over.  We got a good start on that yesterday, hiking a mile to one of the highest roads around here.  It was a warm day, over 80 degrees (sorry Tucson friends; I heard about your 112s), and our dog found a trickling stream on the outer reaches (she has a whole lake near the cabin) of the hike.  She disappeared into the willows a brown and white dog and emerged a black dog.  She suffered her first bath in frigid well water when she got home.  But the steep hikes through the 800 acres here are well worth it.  The views are so varied from different places in the community, and it’s interesting to put names with lots, trailers, “shed” homes, and cabins.  

For the handful of us that are here for months at a time, getting together is becoming routine.  Every Wednesday night we gather, usually at someone’s cabin for games.  Yes.  Games.  Mostly we’ve played dominoes -- new fangled dominos for me, white with colored dots -- a game called Mexican Train (I don’t understand the reference and it can’t be P.C., but it’s right on the box).  It really is a hoot.  Last week we played Farckle, sort of a poker type game, but with dice and a lot more luck than skill.  Still, it’s fun to egg people on into risking their points by appealing to their greedy natures.  It’s a nice low key evening that combines catching-up with some friendly trash-talking competition.  It feels a little pre-TV (most folks don’t bother with that up here), or Little House on the Prairie, but I like it.

Trips to “Town”

Town refer to the little hamlet of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Florissant, a Florissant/Divide combo, Woodland Park, or the Big Adventure of going to Colorado Springs.  No matter which we do, we look forward to Buckin’ Blues (blueberry buckwheat pancakes) at the Hungry Bear, some quite good Chinese at the May Flower (both in Woodland Park), or some exceptional North Carolina style barbeque at a little old log cabin in Divide.  I will confess to enjoying the familiarity of the hot dog/soda combo at Costco for $1.50 if we go to the Springs.  

We look forward to our town trips, about one every week, which can include a trip to Waste Management to get rid of trash and recycling, Goodwill for a treasure hunt (plaid long-sleeved Nautica shirts for $4 for my hubby), various groceries (Costco if we go all the way to the springs), the hardware store, sometimes the feed store for fresh eggs and bird seed, and always the library and the Florissant Post Office.  We’re happy to go, but even more happy to get out of civilization and hit the dirt road on the way home. 

It was odd to have our normal 18 days at the cabin time-frame pass by and here we still are.  For so long the past six years we scrambled for every day we could get here, and now we have this four month embarrassment of riches.  The “we’re here, we’re here, we’re here!” racket is quieting down in our brains and we’re beginning to relax into our second home, its unique routines, and are thinking about some day trips (other than to town).  There are several ghost or semi-ghost towns in the area, all involving beautiful drives.  We want to go see the eagles that hang out in the next town west of us, Lake George.  The Nature Conservancy has a preserve nearby, the High Creek Fen, a continually boggy area similar to a cienega in southern Arizona, and similarly loaded with birds.  There are a lifetime of special places to see in this area of Colorado, and we plan to see most of them.