One Week Down…
Well, Heather and I survived our first week in Colorado. Things were looking pretty good when we first rolled into town. It was about 5pm on New Year’s Day and we arrived in town just as the sun was setting behind the Rocky Mountains. That was beautiful. What wasn’t beautiful was the side roads that we had to travel to get to our yet unseen apartment. They had about 6 inches of hard packed snow and ice on them, and were very rough. After 10 years of not driving in snow very often, I had forgotten how unpleasant it is…
Our moving truck is scheduled to arrive on the 9th, but that depends on the weather. We’ve had an additional 7 inches of snow since we got here. The moving truck is a full-size semi and has to be able to maneuver the roads in order to drop our things off. If it can’t make it in, they’ll have to load our things into a smaller truck and bring that in (at significant cost to us, of course). Because we don’t have our belongings, we’ve been making do with a futon mattress, a couple of suitcases of clothes, and our computers (with no internet for the first 5 days). To entertain ourselves, we’ve been doing a lot of shopping to replenish the items that we had to sell or throw away when we left Raleigh. This has been fun, exhausting, and expensive. While I do enjoy shopping, I’m getting a bit shell shocked by the amount of money we are having to spend to get back to normal. Luckily, we made about $4,000 on things that we sold before we left (including my 53″ Pioneer Elite TV, Apple Dual G5 computer, and vintage ’60s credenza…sigh). That should help defray the costs.
Except for the side roads and not having any furniture, things have been quite nice. We’ve been running a whole house humidifier to keep from drying out. It’s been pumping over 2 gallons of water into the air each day to keep it at the recommended level! The mountains are gorgeous, especially with all of the snow on them. We can’t see them from our home, but as soon as you get out on the main road (less than a mile away), the vista is amazing. I’ll end with a summary of pros and cons comparing living in Longmont, CO to living in Raleigh, NC:
Pros
- Shopping is as good as Raleigh
- Gorgeous scenery
- Faster service and friendlier people everywhere in Longmont (Boulder is not as good)
- Roads are in a grid, and traffic lights don’t take forever to cycle
- Daylight Donuts in Boulder!!!
Cons
- Side roads don’t get plowed
- It’s cold and dry
- The mall is farther away (maybe this is good; it will be harder to spend as much money now)
- Hippies (in Boulder mainly)
- There are still a lot of medians in the road, although not as many as in Raleigh
