In the last few months I’ve been wanting to write about the lifestyle here in the Rocky Mountains and specifically, the areas that comprise the Estes Park real estate market. These would include Allenspark, Meeker Park, Glen Haven, Drake (which means Cedar Park/Cedar Springs/Storm Mountain), and Pinewood Springs (addressed in the
Lyons postal district).
I moved here from a bustling suburb of Kansas City, on the Kansas side of state line, and I took for granted that my world was cluttered with bumper-to-bumper traffic, constant sirens from emergency vehicles, 24-hours of traffic “white noise” and lots of street crime. I suffered from a normal dose of “urban paranoia” which I never even noticed – until I lost it in the Rockies!
Probably most of you reading this come from a city larger than Estes Park, Colorado. That’s not hard to do. So maybe you can identify with my concept of urban paranoia. Just imagine a small mountain community situated in a sense, in a geographic cul-de-sac. The only viable reason for coming through Estes to go somewhere else is to access Rocky
Mountain National Park.
When I moved to the mountains I was pre-occupied with the move. Most of us have moved several times by the time we hit middle age, and the process always tastes the same, or similar. An early disparity in the process occurred when I had to park the rented 25 foot Penske at the bottom of the forest access road and take all my belongings to my new house in pickup truck loads! A father of another realtor had a 3 member crew of house painters that were between jobs, so they helped. None of the crew spoke English, but I’ve seldom seen a harder bunch of workers. It was like being in a weird movie, but we finished in under a day and nothing was broken or missing. Try that with professionals!
My urban tendencies took another hit when I visited the Estes Park True-Value hardware store for the first time. One employee was there, talking to a customer. They were talking about the customer’s sister, who the employee hadn’t seen since high school. This conversation lasted a long 5 minutes and I felt invisible. Finally over, the conversation had a brief resurrection as the customer paused while leaving. By this time I was crazy! I only needed directions to the correct aisle and had almost 7 minutes invested without even being acknowledged! However, when that customer finally succeeded in leaving, the employee greeted me amiably and spent nearly as long helping me – no hurry.
I had numerous experiences for the first year I lived here that abrased the edges of my urbanity. It took 18 months for me to realize that it had taken me 12 months to DECOMPRESS! How good is that?!
Now I can spot the folks who are un-decompressed. They stick out – walking advertisements to their lifestyles of urban stress. My boss says we are selling a lifestyle more than anything else. He’s probably right.
The good news for me is that I can enjoy living it myself, while selling it to others.
