Leaving Loveland

Devil’s Backbone

April 10, 2017 — Leave a comment

Day eleven in my “Leaving Loveland” challenge.

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Nathan and Cody and I hiked at Devil’s Backbone today. This place is just on the west side of Loveland, miles and miles of trails that connect up with other hiking areas north of here to Fort Collins. Nathan loves to go mountain biking here. One time he killed a rattlesnake that wouldn’t leave the path. Today we only saw birds, grasshoppers, and some mule deer.

Today was a perfect day for hiking here. In the heat of summer it’s scorching, because there is practically no shade to speak of. Today the sun was warming instead of withering. And since it was a Monday, the trail was pretty quiet, unlike the crowds that descend on the weekends.

I’m feeling a bit sick today so we didn’t go as far as we like to. If you continue taking the trail we were on, you’ll gain enough elevation that you can get some beautiful views of the bigger snow-capped mountains. (Or if you take the shorter Keyhole trail, you get those views much more quickly but you’re actually right at the Backbone formation so you can’t see it like you can in these pictures.) If you look closely at the photo above, off to the right behind the foothills you can see one snowy peak peeking out.

Garfield Elementary

April 8, 2017 — Leave a comment

Day ten in my “Leaving Loveland” challenge.

We have been very happy with the elementary school our kids both attended here in Loveland. We moved here the summer before Luthien began fourth grade and Silas began first. Lu has since moved on to middle school, but Silas will have spent all his school years in Loveland right here at Garfield Elementary.

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Garfield is the arts-focused elementary school here in Loveland, so the arts are integrated throughout the curriculum. One project some of the students worked on was making these murals to decorate the modular building the school uses for additional space; and Silas got to be in a group that designed and painted the mural on the left (under the supervision of a local artist).

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Here’s a closeup of Silas and company’s mural. They wanted to include music and visual art and drama as well as the playground, mountains, and their school mascot, Grizzlies.

Loveland Municipal Building

April 7, 2017 — Leave a comment

Day nine in my “Leaving Loveland” challenge.

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This is the view from my living room window. The building on the left was originally Washington School, built in 1905, which is quite old for this town. It now, along with the addition built onto it, houses city administration offices. It’s where I go to drop off my ballot for elections, or pay my utility bill (okay, actually I pay my bill online but I could drop my payment there if I so desired).

That huge evergreen used to get ceremonially lit for Christmas every year, but now another fake tree gets constructed and then lit up on the main drag, Fourth Street, in front of the Rialto Theater, a few blocks away from here.

It’s a bit hard to see, but there’s a sculpture to the right of the evergreen. Loveland is ga-ga for sculpture – especially bronze sculpture – but this piece is a stone sculpture from Zimbabwe, like many of the pieces at Chapungu Sculpture Park, which is on the east side of Loveland.

 

Lake Loveland

April 6, 2017 — 2 Comments

Day eight in my “Leaving Loveland” challenge.

One of my big questions when we were thinking of moving from Minnesota to the Front Range of Colorado was, where are the lakes? Where can we swim? And when I asked this question in an online forum, the general consensus from Coloradoans was, you are moving to the high desert from the land of ten thousand lakes. Might need to lower your expectations a bit in that department.

And they were right. One of the things I’m looking forward to in returning to Minnesota is the water.

BUT, if you were to look for a relatively (in 2013 that is) affordable place to live on the Front Range and wanted to have some water to play in, you could do worse than Loveland. Right in the middle of town is Lake Loveland (um, really, there’s a website called lakeloveland.com?!), and it has a swim beach. Additionally, on the east side of town there’s actually a state park with a decent-sized lake that also has a swim beach, Boyd Lake State Park. Both of these beaches are easy bicycling distance from our house.

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This is not a great photo of Lake Loveland, but it’s what I was able to snap as we walked out of our realtor’s office today after signing papers involving selling our house. That road is Highway 34, which runs along the south of the lake and goes all the way into Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park (except, unfortunately, for this year, when it’s closed for construction a few miles west of town).

One very different thing about lakes here from Minnesota, is that they don’t often maintain their water level all year round. The dry climate contributes to that, and in Lake Loveland’s case, so does the fact that the nearby city of Greeley owns the water rights to this lake, and will drain it as needed.

Here’s Lake Loveland just over a year ago, February 2016:

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The kids and the dog enjoyed walking around the lakebed. Luthien found a safety cone and some sort of shell in this photo. Cody (the dog) found several dead fish.

Bai Tong

April 5, 2017 — Leave a comment

Day seven in my “Leaving Loveland” challenge.

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When we moved to Loveland in 2013, we were discouraged to find that this town of over 70,000 people had no Thai restaurants. Now there are two that I know of, and Bai Tong, within walking distance, has become a favorite date night destination. Today we met friends there for lunch (it was Nathan’s first day not working full time anymore!), and I thoroughly enjoyed my Panang curry with brown rice (and eagerly await the next time I’m hungry when I can finish my leftovers!).