Imagine a place with the best water you’ve ever tasted, not bottled, but flowing from every tap.
Imagine air, crisp and devoid of humditity. Imagine the most scenic vistas imaginable, of mountains and wildlife surrounding you in 360 degrees of God’s creation.
Imagine all this, and you’ll have Estes Park, Colorado, the place I’ve shared with elk, gray jay’s, fat chipmunks, and my darling for the past few days.
Yes, folks, I’ve been on VACATION! Having done the sea-level thing just a few months ago, we decided to try the opposite: Where St. Petersburg is developed, hot, and sea-level, the Rockies are wild, chilly, and relatively untouched. If you like nature at ALL, then go there.
There’s so much to say about the place! Each part–the land, the water, the air, the people, the animals, the weather–deserves its own blog entry. Hell, each of them deserve a treatise!
But just to begin…
The Altitude
Georgetown, Kentucky is at ~900 feet above sea level. After one short flight on Frontier airlines out of Indianapolis and a 2 hr drive in a rented Chrysler 300 from Thrifty, Whitney and I were at seven thousand feet. The next day, on a small peak beside the Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain Nat’l Park, we were a smidge above 12,000 feet.
Altitude like that does things to you. At 12,000 feet, you have only 60% of the oxygen you had at sea level, so you feel the effects–gasping for breath at only mild exertion, confused thinking, and digestion problems.
Whitney and I did really well. By our third day at altitude, we were conversing normally during walks along the ridge line at 11k-12k feet. I had a headache on the first night, but our appetites came back in full force by our first morning there.
On the flip side, returning to Georgetown has me feeling at once energized and yet draggy. The air here is dense, so I feel alert and energized, but it’s DENSE: It feels like I’m surrounded by a bog or marsh, the air cloying at me like I’m swimming through a pool. Also, there’s no humidity at altitude, but here the air’s super-saturated.
Thankfully, it’s still cool for August here in Georgetown (only high 70’s), but I’m still mostly cloistered indoors, with the air conditioning removing the humidity I can’t stand.
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