Day 21 – Sweet Freedom

Rocky Mountain National Park & Estes Park

This YMCA is quite a complex.  There are multiple lodges, many cabins, restaurants, and pretty much every recreational facility you can think of.  Best of all…there is day camp.

Today has been a long-awaited day for Bob and me.  We arrived at the YMCA on a Thursday night, just in time to put the kids into day camp for a single day, their last day of camp of the season.  We rearranged plans to arrive in CO a day earlier than originally planned, filled out seemingly hundreds of forms, signed waivers, obtained medical records – all for this single shining day.  So from 8:30 to 3:30, we are FREE.

2pm: According to plan: we are at some pristine Rocky Mountain summit right now, having taken on a long and difficult hike that would have been too much for the kids.  We are tired but triumphant, proud of our day’s effort.

In reality, we’re sitting at the bar at the Estes Park Brewery, drinking beer and eating loaded nachos, watching the Olympics.  We just strolled over here from the Estes Park winery, where we had a very pleasant wine tasting.  (We were annoyed, however, to find that they actually welcomed kids there, having a little toy room for them and a free fruit cider tasting.  We’re wasting our adult time on a place where we could have brought the kids!)

When I say we’re watching the Olympics, I should clarify that this is on a weekday afternoon, so we’re not exactly seeing prime time events here.  In fact, what we’re watching is rhythmic gymnastics.  The qualifying round of rhythmic gymnastics.  But it’s the only Olympics we’ve seen at all, so we are enthralled.

 

To be fair, we did go on a 5+ mile hike this morning, through beautiful mountain scenery, along pristine lakes and running rivers.  We didn’t get to do the longer, more ambitious one we’d planned because of road construction at the park – we weren’t allowed to drive to the trailhead, and they warned us the shuttle could take over an hour each way.  We’d thought of doing multiple smaller hikes – but after the first one, the siren call of the beer and TV was too much to resist.

Reunited after day camp

We arrived back in plenty of time to pick up the kids and engage in wholesome family fun for the remainder of the day – we swam, we showered, we ate in the dining room, we played bingo.  And then went to bed in our nice clean sheets.

Who knew that there was a team event in rhythmic gymnastics?

***

From Bob:

Jen and I are both in our 40s now, and it’s easy to think that we’ve passed the proverbial continental divide of our lives, ready to ride the gentle slope eastward and downward to our watery Atlantic graves.  I keep looking for signs of our aging, and they are there – or not there, as is the case with the hair on top of my head.  We might not be as bad off as I thought it was, though.

                Yes, we are tired a lot these days, with all the driving and seemingly-nonstop parenting, not to mention all the blogging.  Jen suggested that we bring the bikes along for this trip partly because she envisioned us getting up early and hopping out of our sleeping bags to zoom around the National Parks on two wheels.  In reality, we’ve found ourselves lingering in the sleeping bags most mornings.  Ok, it was cold in Yellowstone.  A grizzly attack might, MIGHT, have gotten us out of our sleeping bags before 7 (Mountain Standard Time). 

I think what’s really happening is the she and I are conserving our energy to help us deal with the constant threat of the unexpected happening on this trip.   The planning and preparation, as many people have noted in response to this blog, have been top notch, but the nature of such a trip means that something totally oddball can happen at just about any moment.  Kids just multiply the oddball chances.  Now, it is unlikely that Lanie would be kidnapped by bighorn sheep while we’re In the Rockies, but it’s a heck of a lot more likely to happen out here than it would be in New Hampshire.

So it is with much pride and not a little relief that I find that Jen and I were absolute go-getters today on a day when the unexpected was a little bit more at arm’s length.  With our kids in good hands and us on our way to the National Park to hike, Jen mused that what we should be doing is finding a bar in which we could drink and watch the Olympics. 

Why not, I ask, do both? 

I mean, we were in our 30s just a few short years ago.  Forget the fact that “Thirtysomething” was a tv show about old people.   We exercise regularly and eat wholesome foods.  We do not, usually, drink to excess. 

RMNP was kind enough to provide a detailed list of the ways we could die.
Oddly, they did not include driving off a cliff.

We tackled Cub Lake hike, more than five miles at altitude, in very good stride, eating our granola bar and apple lunches on the way.  Had option B not been available, we might well have gone on for another two miles to Fern Lake.  Heck, had Bear Lake Road been open or if the lady hadn’t warned us that the shuttle takes an hour and a half both ways (that can’t be possible, but we couldn’t risk it), we might have forgotten option B and gone for the Sky Pond trail. 

Option B worked fine for us, though.  A short drive into Estes Park, and after a brief distraction at a winery we got to the beer and Olympics that my good planning wife improvised on the way out the door.  We took corner seats and held up that bar for a good deal of ribbon twirling and hula hoop tossing.

And we still had enough energy after all that to be parents once 3 pm came around.  I don’t remember much about the afternoon and evening, but I’m pretty sure we did fine by our kids.

It’s possible that the effects of parenting are not unlike those of smoking – which is interesting because smoking is one of the vices we didn’t quite get to today.  Smokers avail themselves to many long-term diseases, to be sure, but their lungs clear up quit rapidly after they’ve quit for good.  It might be that way with kids. You’re almost always tired while you have to keep an eye on them, but when you’re off the clock it’s like you’re in your 30s – your early 30s – again.