Maria's Road Trip to the Rockies, Part 3: Fun Times in Estes Park, Colorado

Part 1: Kansas City to Limon, Colorado
Part 2: Limon to Estes Park, Colorado

The highlights of my trip so far have been the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. My husband (Dan) and I have just spent Monday night in my parents' lovely condo at Mary's Lake Lodge in Estes Park, Colorado. We'll spend the next three nights here.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

The snowcapped peaks are nestled in fog this morning. It's cool and drizzly. Good thing Dan picked up that jacket in Boulder yesterday.

We eat some leftover donuts for breakfast and lounge around the condo, reading the novels we've brought along. I'm reading Luthiel's Song: Dreams of the Ringed Vale by Robert Fanney, who also writes on AC, and Dan is reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. I read Angels and Demons several years ago, so I make a nuisance of myself by interrupting Dan to ask him "who's died so far" every couple of chapters. I don't know why he puts up with me.

I'm tired of waiting for the sun to come out and ready to take a tour of The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. It's supposedly haunted, you know, and, even cooler than that, it's the hotel that inspired Stephen King to write The Shining! We figure we can find The Stanley Hotel without the GPS, and we're right. There it is, up on the hill behind the grocery store. (See figure 1.)

We take some pictures and go inside. The next tour doesn't start until 1:00. That gives us plenty of time to pick up some groceries: milk, orange juice, Pepto Bismal-if you read Parts 1 and 2, you know why we need "the pink stuff"-and a postcard with a picture of Rocky Mountain baby animals for our kids. (The kids are doing great, by the way. I could write several articles about all the fun things they're doing with Nana and Papa in Kansas City.) We mail the postcard and go back to the condo to eat our leftovers from The Tavern for lunch.

My fish and chips haven't improved with age. I peel most of the greasy coating off the fish before I eat it. Dan's meatloaf and mashed potato leftovers look disgusting, but he seems to enjoy them. He keeps stealing potato chips off my plate. Ew, he even eats the soggy chips-the ones that are soaked in coleslaw juice! It's okay, though, 'cause we've got Pepto Bismal in the condo now.

Time to head back to The Stanley Hotel. We pay for our Ghosts & History Tour ($10 per person) and gather in the basement, in Steamers Café, and read our brochure while we're waiting for the tour to begin. Let's see...The Stanley Hotel is 100 years old this year. F.O. Stanley was a wealthy genius who invented lots of neat stuff, including the Stanley Steamer, a steam-powered car. (See figure 2.) Many famous people-John Philip Sousa, Theodore Roosevelt, Stephen King, Jim Carrey, and the "Unsinkable" Molly Brown, to name a few-have stayed at The Stanley Hotel. At least seven different ghosts roam these old rooms...

Oh, good. Here's our tour guide: 20-year-old Tyler from Rochester, New York, in black slacks and a royal-blue button-up shirt. Tyler is insanely enthusiastic and so darn cute! Whenever he starts talking about a ghost, we're all supposed to let out a warbling "woooooooo!"

Now would be a good time to mention a few things: I believe in ghosts, but I've never seen a ghost. Dan does not believe in ghosts (and I'm assuming he's also never seen one). I think it would be incredibly cool to see a ghost doing exactly what he did when he was alive, a hundred years ago. I'd walk down a hallway in The Stanley Hotel, for example, and see a pair of ghosts leaving their room, dressed in their finest dinner attire. I'd get a whiff of the ghost lady's perfume and her ghost husband's cigar. Maybe I'd hear them whispering to each other. SO COOL!!!

Here's how my cool ghost fantasy becomes a horrific ghost nightmare: The ghosts sense my presence, turn around to look at me, and then they morph into screeching demons and charge through me. "You don't belong here! GET OUT!" they'd shriek at me, and I'd pee my pants and hightail it out of that hotel and never ever ever go back. Basically, as long as the ghosts ignore me, I'd like to see them; but if they're going to notice me and attempt to touch me or talk to me, I do not want to see them. Ever.

So I have mixed feelings about ghosts, but I'm confident that the ghosts of The Stanley Hotel aren't going to bother me when I'm with a big group of people. Tyler thinks he's friends with all the ghosts, anyway, so we must be safe when he's around. The tour is so much fun. Even without the ghost stories, the hotel has a fascinating history. I'm absolutely enthralled, from beginning to end.

According to Tyler (and whoever wrote Tyler's script), Stephen King saw ghosts all over the place when he stayed at The Stanley Hotel in 1973: ghosts of rich people dancing in the ballroom, ghost children in the hallway, a ghost maid in the bathtub of his hotel room. Stephen King and his wife stayed in Room 217, the suite where all those famous people I mentioned earlier also stayed.

It should be noted that Jim Carrey didn't actually spend the night in Room 217. A couple of hours after he checked in, he bolted out of the room, screaming, "Get me the hell out of here!" and couldn't be persuaded to return to the hotel. (Tyler does a respectable, funny Jim Carrey impression.) Carrey was shooting Dumb and Dumber at the time, and chose to stay at the Estes Park Holiday Inn for the rest of his visit. Nobody knows who or what Jim Carrey saw in that room, but Tyler reckons it was Mrs. Wilson.

Elizabeth Wilson was a maid who worked at The Stanley Hotel for many, many years. She accidentally blew up part of the hotel (gas lamp mishap-KABOOM!) and somehow survived. F.O. Stanley was such a nice guy, he paid all of Mrs. Wilson's medical bills and let her work at his hotel for the rest of her life. And she "works" there still.

My tour group is lucky enough to get to go inside Room 217--only after Tyler has asked Mrs. Wilson's permission, of course. The ghost hunters in my tour group go nuts, snapping pictures of everything in the room. (See figure 3.) "Does anyone feel any 'cold spots' anywhere?" Tyler asks. I wave my hands around like an idiot, but, no, I don't feel anything unusual. The kid in our group thinks he feels a cold spot by the bed, but this is the same kid who thinks he feels a ghost playing with his hair on the fourth floor. (The fourth floor is The Stanley's most haunted floor, according to Tyler.)

Dan is a good sport about taking lots of pictures for me. (See figures 4 and 5.) You never know where an orb or strange mist might turn up in The Stanley. "Stairwells are vortexes," says Tyler, so we take lots of pictures of stairwells. Tyler is very encouraging, and even comes around to check all our digital cameras for "interesting" pictures. One lady in our group takes a picture in which two bright blue orbs show up against a dark background. And Dan's video footage of our group yelling "hello!" into the tunnel under The Stanley comes out funky: it looks like the lights are turned off in the video replay, but they weren't! I think that calls for a warbling "woooooooooooooo!"

After our tour's over, I fill out a comment card, giving Tyler a glowing recommendation. Dan gets a frou-frou coffee drink in Steamers Café while I hop onto one of the public computers in the dining area to check my email. I send off a couple of messages. (My AC email notifications are piling up, but I can't do a thing about it. Sorry, guys!) Then we head back to the condo. It's too cold and wet to do anything outside.

We read some more. I can't believe how long it's taking all those cardinals to die in Dan's book. My book keeps getting better. Luthiel's such a generous, smart, brave elf. (She needs to smack some sense into my silly Dragonelf character.)

Soon, even though it's only 4, I'm starving. My stomach's still on Central Time. At first I want Italian food. Then we decide Mexican sounds good to both of us, so we grab our umbrella, head out, and set the GPS for Grumpy Gringo in Estes Park.

We choose Grumpy Gringo mostly because of its name, but the food is great! The salsa isn't quite as good as Dos Reales' in Kansas City, but it's still delicious, and spicy enough to make my nose run. Dan has a Corona and some sort of combination platter. I order Grumpy's veggie burrito with vegetarian sauce. I come close to ordering a Very Berry Colada, but settle on plain old water to drink. The burrito is wonderful-loaded with veggies and beans, and smothered in yummy white cheese, topped with fresh green onions, lettuce, tomato, guacamole, and sour cream. It's a big burrito, but I eat the whole thing. MMMmmmm!

After supper we drive over to Star Video, hoping to find Season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Dan and I started watching Buffy a couple of months ago, and we love it. We meant to bring along our latest Buffy Netflix rental, but forgot. D'oh! Well, tiny Star Video doesn't have Buffy, but they do have Slumdog Millionaire, which we haven't seen. We don't have a Star Video membership, obviously, but they make it easy for tourists to rent movies. They add a $20 refundable deposit to our rental fee and give us a temporary membership card. The ladies who work at Star Video in Estes Park are very friendly, I must say.

Slumdog Millionaire is a good movie, but I never want to see it again. It's one of those kinds of movies. Our "movie theatre butter" Pop Secret microwave popcorn is wonderful-even better than the movie, if I'm being entirely honest. Am I supposed to get up and dance now that the movie's over? That's what all the actors are doing. Whatever. I'm going to bed.

In Part 4 (click here to read Part 4 now), Dan and I will explore Rocky Mountain National Park. I should've packed some hiking boots...

For more information about The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, check out these sites:

http://www.stanleyhotel.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Hotel
http://ghosthuntingsecrets.com/blog/?p=5

Sources:

Tyler, our wonderful tour guide at The Stanley Hotel
My brochure from The Stanley Hotel
Personal experience
Overactive imagination