I usually do most of my writing while riding in the car between locations, but Colorado is so beautiful I didn’t want to miss any of it.  I spent all day gazing out the window.

Not so for Isabella … she is writing a novel in the back seat.  She won’t tell us what it’s about, only that she’s on Chapter 4 and “It’s about interesting stuff.  Not, like, Jack did some boring things and then went back to his boring house and had a boring conversation with another really boring person, like in the books you read.  My novel is about people, but interesting people.”

This isn’t a problem until she gets mad over having missed something.  I bought a little buffalo sculpture in a shop this afternoon and said, “This is a nice way to remember that huge heard of buffalo we saw earlier.”  She said, “What buffalo?  We didn’t see any buffalo.”

“Yes we did.  There were probably over a hundred of them.  We all had a long conversation about them.  How could you not have noticed?”

“I was writing.  You should have told me to look out the window.  Thanks a lot.”

We drove through the Rocky Mountains National Park on our way from Colorado Springs to Estes Park.  We stopped frequently to make snowballs, admire wild animals (deer, elk, caribou, moose, marmots, and, of course, buffalo) and poke around in the woods.

Wildlife gets right up close to the roads.

Finally, photographic proof that Adam is on this trip, too.

True to form, Holden got himself into a bit of a pickle.  We got out of the car near a big snow bank and the kids took off before I had a chance to warn them about unmelted summer mountain snow.  I ran after them yelling, “Don’t walk on the snow!  You never know how deep it is and it can be really dangerous!”  They all yelled back, “Yeah, yeah, we know!” (because, of course, they know everything.)

Holden approached the edge of a patch of snow and hesitated briefly.  In the split second it took me to realize what he was intending to do, he interpreted my lack of screaming “NO!” as permission and stepped out on the edge of it.  He immediately sank in up to his hip and lost his shoe.  I had to lay on a cold, melty snowbank and dig it out.  (It was really hard to find, too.)  He was pretty subdued after that, although once we were back in the car he did start to complain about his wet socks.  I turned around and gave him the evil eye, and he had the good sense to shut up.

Me bailing Holden out. Note his body language: he was really nervous about what his fate would be should the shoe be lost forever.

Josie learning from Holden’s mistake and NOT stepping in the snow.

Example of just how deep the snow can get.

Tonight we are checked into The Stanley hotel (in Estes Park, CO) , the original inspiration for Stephen King’s book “The Shining.”  As it turns out, Stanley Kubrick didn’t use this hotel in his movie, which irritated Stephen King.  (He also substituted Glacier National Park in Montana for all the Colorado footage.)  So, in 1997 they did a new made-for-TV version that was filmed here, and Stephen King even played a minor role.  (I haven’t seen that version.)  The neatest part, as far as I’m concerned, is the bar.  It’s exactly like he describes in the book.

As a special bonus surprise, we discovered that The Stanley was also a filming location for the movie “Dumb and Dumber.”  This is the hotel (fictionally relocated) in Aspen where Lloyd and Harry finally found Mary “Samsonite” Swanson.

The Stanley is said to be haunted.  Downstairs, underneath the lobby, they have a “resident psychic” but she wasn’t in last night.  They also have some neat movie artifacts from The Shining and Dumb & Dumber, a butterfly garden, and an ice cream shop.  The hotel offers Ghost Tours but we didn’t sign up for that.

The other aspect of the hotel that stood out for me wasn’t even the hotel itself:  it was the drive up.  The road through Rocky Mountain National Park really is closed during the winter.  Even during the summer it gets cold enough after dark for water to freeze dangerously on the roads, so they close it at 8:00 p.m. each night.  The sense of isolation King described in his book becomes apparent.  If you were here in the winter, you really would be stranded.

Even considering the grandeur of the national park, the highlight of my day was dinner at The Cascades, the restaurant in The Stanley’s lobby.  It’s adjacent to the famous bar.  I kept thinking Stephen King probably ate right here!  Stephen King probably ordered a drink at that bar!  Stephen King probably walked up this staircase and touched this bannister!  I was totally star-struck by a guy who wasn’t even there.  I like to think that I’d be cool if I ever saw someone famous (and I did remain cool when I saw Patrick Stewart at The Tower of London last year) but if Stephen King abruptly entered my field of vision, I’d probably hyperventilate and pass out like overwrought ladies back in the corset days.  I would not be cool.  I know this about myself now, because I wasn’t very cool last night at dinner when I was eating in a place I knew he has visited a couple of times.

Redrum, redrum.

Footnote:  The guy Adam met with in Oklahoma City last week sent him this email:

“That was a pretty rough introduction to Oklahoma.  Glad everyone was OK.  In the one night you stayed in OKC you were closer to a tornado than I have been in the 40 years I have lived here.

You might be interested to know that they upgraded the El Reno tornado (part of the storm system that hit you all on Friday night) to an EF-5 (the worst category of tornado.)  It was also determined to be 2.6 miles wide.  The largest tornado ever recorded.  Fortunately, for most of it’s path as an EF-5 it was over open farmland.”