Rocky Mountain National Park

We have been back  home in North Carolina for a week now. This final blog post, two weeks late, should catch matters up and complete the story of our two month trip. 

 Following our time in Denver and Boulder we headed west and up into the mountains, spending a week in Rocky Mountain National Park. I’ve been to the Colorado mountains a number of times before. I was here a few times with my family as a child; I spent three years living in Boulder while attending college at the University of Colorado, and we’ve made three family vacation trips to Colorado with the  children.  But it is easy to forget things and I was struck with how amazingly scenic this state is and how extensive the parks and wilderness areas and natural forests are. For people interested in the outdoors and who do not need to be by a coast or a lake, it is hard to imagine a more attractive area to live in. There’s a lifetime of places to hike and bicycle and camp and explore. The weather is perhaps the best on the continent, lots of sunshine, rarely too hot, and except at high elevations the winters are not overly cold. For people interested in winter sports it is a paradise. Not surprisingly, many of the areas around the Front Range of Denver and Boulder and Fort Collins have become crowded and quite expensive in recent decades. Rocky Mountain National Park is highly visited and requires timed entry tickets and the use of shuttle buses due to limited parking at trail heads. You can’t complain about this of course when you are part of the crowd.

 So why do I not live in Colorado? As a primary care physician I probably could have gotten a Colorado job without much difficulty. Now retired, I suppose we could move there if we chose to. For me however, Colorado is just too nice; it is too sunny, too cheerful, the people are too young and too healthy. I don’t know what I would have done as a doctor.  For most people in the world I suppose the question of where to live never arises. Most people are probably constrained by economics or family obligations or other circumstances and where they live is not so much chosen as fallen into. And of course people’s inclinations differ. I remember reading, I no longer remember where:

To some God gave the love of the hearth and home,
To others he gave the urge to roam

I am certainly in the latter category. We have a fireplace but we never use it. We very much like our house where we have lived for 29 years, but I think I would also be content in a series of hotel rooms. I think the camper van is spacious. I have been fortunate however to love where we have lived. I had a wonderful job, wonderful partners, appreciative patients who have needed my services, and a beautiful uncrowded place to live and raise children. We are surrounded by mountains and wilderness; we have a reasonable amount of refreshingly overcast days. It rains. Now, life having progressed, we are relatively close to two of our three children and a day’s drive from Laura’s parents who need us. We are looking forward to the arrival in Raleigh of our first grandchild in December. So I think we are staying in Waynesville for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, it is fun to see other places and consider other possibilities of living. Colorado in the summer and fall is a paradise and hopefully we will be able to spend several months there in the coming years.

What happens to my blog now that our trip is done? Well, I suspect I may publish some posts in the future if we travel more or if I think I have anything worthwhile to say. But future posts may be few and on no predictable schedule. Regarding retirement, I think I’m going to soon brave going down into our basement and maybe even the backyard; I have been avoiding those places for years. Perhaps some order can be imposed on them. Or perhaps I will just come back upstairs and start planning another trip.

Here are pictures from Rocky Mountain National Park: