Being able to camp here was an amazing stroke of luck, to begin with. You book a place to camp at recreation.gov, and my parents had been looking for a place to camp, but we booked it a little late. We didn't really realize the potential of camping until the middle of summer, so we didn't really plan ahead. So when a spot opened up during Labor Day weekend, it was unbelievable. Of course, we booked it immediately.
I'm currently in college, so I was still doing homework and working Friday night before we left. Along with my parents still work and my younger sister is also in school, so we kind of haphazardly packed everything the night before with little planning. We had gone camping before and it went all right, so this wasn't our first rodeo.
Saturday we had a bit of a rough start, everyone woke up kind of late and we still did last-minute packing and cooking so we left a little before noon. We were confused by the navigation by Google, there was the main route using I-70 that seemed congested due to the forest fires, and another way via Estes Park that only showed up on one of our phones, but not two of them. It looked like going via Estes Park was shorter, so we went that way.
We realized when we hit Estes Park that we were going to have to pass through Rocky Mountain National Park, which has a limited number of passes available due to Covid-19 that needed to be booked in advance. We did not do that, so we had to go back down through I-70 (but instead of backtracking completely, we went down using Allenspark). However, we were hungry, so we took our fried rice and decided to take our lunch at Estes Park.
Honestly, it cost more than it was worth. We did get to eat outside in some nature, but so many people were not wearing face masks, and for me at least, there's something aggravating about it. It's so easy to wear a mask and it protects others, yet people decide not to. I can't help but think of a meme I saw whenever I see people without a face mask (shown below), yet I know that confronting them just results in a loss for me.
So we hurriedly scarfed down our food and left, taking the long trip down from Estes Park towards our destination.
We arrived fairly late (a couple hours before sunset), and the host of the campsite had given our site to someone else. But it was just a minor inconvenience. The people were in a mobile home, so they quickly packed up and moved sites and we moved in. Again, it wasn't that big of a deal, it was just something that happened.
So we hurriedly put up our tent and made dinner in the waning hours of sunlight. We also tried to set up our telescope, but it was just too much in too little time, so it didn't work out very well. My sister was in charge of our meals for the trip, and she planned some canned soup and bread for dinner. I realized that she had overplanned the amount of bread that we had since she planned bread for dinner and for lunch the next day with just one loaf. So perhaps in the future, we need to bring two loaves.
The stars were amazing. There wasn't a cloud in sight and there was little light pollution so we could see a whole new array of stars. We could even make out the milky way galaxy with the strip of stars, and we watched the big dipper dip below a mountain. It was truly beautiful, but we were too tired and wanted to get up early the next morning to really take it in.
We got up the next morning and took a hike around the lake up from the camping site. We took our car and drove a few minutes away from the campsite to a trailhead that was packed (which was reasonable considering how it was 9-10am). The funny thing was, as soon as we parked, even more cars came up the road and tried to find a place to park. So even though we were later than we wanted to be, we still somehow 'beat the rush.'
It ended up being much longer than expected. We wanted to sit by the lake and eat, but there was a large stretch that went through the forest that seemed to go on forever. We did bring some granola to snack on while we were hiking, so we snacked on them until we got to the lake.
It was pretty windy where we were sitting, but that was probably because we were right by the lake. But it was nice and shaded, so we took a break to eat our sandwiches. There were also a lot of people who were doing things on the lake, like kayaking or paddleboarding. Since we didn't have any of the aforementioned equipment, we just took a nice hike.
My dad has also been taking a lot of scenery videos for his zoom backgrounds since we are in the middle of a pandemic and he's working at home.
Also, there were a lot of people who didn't wear masks. I've decided that if they're not going to respect my life (by wearing a mask to help prevent the spread of covid), I won't respect them and say hi or try to be friendly with them.
Again, a lot of people had brought equipment to play in the water with, but we mostly just waded. However, the water was pretty cold, so we didn't get into the water that much (except my sister). She was playing with the rocks trying to find nice ones to skip, and just kept on going deeper and deeper. She got to a point where she was waist-deep in water and her arms and tips of her hair were soaked. We were joking with her she just needed to dunk herself in the water by this point, because she was almost already completely wet.
The lake (manmade by the way) was huge. It felt almost like I was back traveling in Indonesia it was so much water. It felt like we were on the edge of the ocean, and the mountains in the background were islands that were cropping up from the water.
The other side of the lake had a completely different view from the one seeming to go on forever. This side felt more like it was nestled in between mountains, and the background looked prettier, even though the foreground was a little ugly since the waters were shallow.
That night we were able to take some time to watch the night sky. As I mentioned before, it was gorgeous, and we saw a lot of the same things we saw the night before. We received a telescope from my great-aunt, so we brought it with us and tried to use it to focus on some planets, but it still looked like tiny white dots in the telescope, so we abandoned that and just sat in chairs while gazing at awe at the sky.
On the way back, there was already some traffic in the mountains (probably caused from traffic lights in streets that cause a huge backup). We left before noon, and we just had a fairly large, protein-filled brunch (half a bagel, corn beef hash, eggs, and some bacon), so we were ready to make the trip. Overall it wasn't too bad. It's pretty calm and I got to choose the music we listened to since I was the driver.
I know I'm a pretty slow driver, and I was driving a little conservatively because our car was packed along with a bag on top. I'm not too upset when people pass me, except when we're in the middle of a traffic jam. There was one particularly bad pass when I was crossing a fast road (like a single lane highway) and I hesitated for a moment, making sure I'd be able to cross in time when the car behind me cut me on the turn. This was a single turn lane, and I was watching my right to make sure it was safe, so when I make the acceleration and turn into the smaller road, the car behind me had done the same thing just a second earlier. It was a little stressful since I wasn't watching to make sure the car behind me didn't cut me off. Luckily, there was no collision.
A second (mostly just annoying) pass was down the mountain. It was pretty much brakes on all the time traffic, with some almost stop and go. I didn't want to burn out the brakes by holding them the entire way down the mountain, so I would come to pretty much a complete stop, and then let the car roll until I had to stop again. The car was pretty heavy, so once we started rolling it got fast. But apparently, this was aggravating for the car behind me, since they passed me as soon as they could, even though it wasn't like they were getting anywhere fast. It was still the same stop and go traffic for 15-30 minutes.
However, we made it home early afternoon, since we definitely wanted to beat the rush home and get ready for the next week.
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