Nederland, CO

A COVID drive.

We had to cancel our big trip to the French Alps thanks to COVID, and predictably we just couldn’t stand not traveling at all. But these were still the early, very nervous days of COVID lockdown, so we decided to handle our need to get out by driving to Colorado and, duh, minimizing contact with other people. We chose a small town west of Denver and about an hour south of Estes Park. We’ve been to Estes Park many times and love that part of the Rocky Mountain National Park, but it’s typically crowded so we decided to opt for a different part of the Park and indeed some hiking outside the Park entirely, So we ended up at Nederland, in a VRBO that consists of a vacation cabin built around an old mining cabin.

The great excitement during this trip was having a moose walk about ten feet to my left as we sat outside Zooming with friends in Connecticut. One of them said, “What’s that?” And by the time I looked over my shoulder and sorted things out, I decided the better part of valor was to just sit still and hope the moose would treat me as furniture. Indeed, it just brushed the small tree to my left, barged on up the hill a short way, and proceeded to address a tree in exactly the way I was happy it had not interacted with me.