A Sense of Direction

If you’re looking for asthma information, please check out these popular posts or feel free to dig around in the archives and check out the excellent respiratory resources in the left sidebar:

The Asthma Mom Glossary
Indoor VOC’s and Asthma Kids
Early Warning Trigger Symptoms
Seasonal Allergy Tips
Fun With Nasal Washes
Taming the Mama Bear

For the regulars, or for those of you in the mood to read a long and rambling post on moving and the scenic joys of the Rocky Mountain West, read on:

Catching Up

It takes me months–and I’m talking 12 months here, roughly–to stop getting lost in new places. I lack a sense of direction, so finding my way in and out of neighborhoods and high-congestion areas doesn’t come intuitively. I get turned around all the time, and also? Reading maps isn’t my strong suit, either.

While this revelation–which isn’t news to any of my in-person friends who’ve ridden in a car with me–may prompt you to leave a comment on the joys of a GPS, I’ve tried that. Yes, a GPS keeps me from getting lost. But no, it doesn’t actually help me learn my way around a city in the way figuring out the route for myself does. When I first drove to my new home here from my in-laws’ where we stayed the first week, I used a GPS and therefore had no clear recollection how I did it or would ever do it again.

So driving out here is always an adventure, especially when you add in the scenery. There are views everywhere, basically. I’m sure the landscape of valleys and rolling hills dwarfed by the jagged rocky peaks to the west will fade into the background after awhile, but I’m sort of hoping they don’t.

The part of the Florida panhandle where I used to live is called the Emerald Coast because of – in travel-brochure speak – its warm, emerald-green water and white sand beaches. Those beaches do live up to the hype, but I didn’t live at the beach. Most people don’t, and visiting Florida is not nearly the same thing as living in Florida.

Unless you live near the beach, you don’t see that sugar and emerald view everyday. It’s nothing like the wide sky I can see everywhere here, the landscape of hills and valleys spread out over the land and the brown and purple and snowy western peaks.

So, yeah.

No sense of direction + scenic distractions = not the safest driving conditions.

Luckily, I moved here during a mild winter, so snow hasn’t been obscuring these unfamiliar roads.

On this blog, I’ve been feeling that same wandering around lately. I’m directionless. Part of that comes from the adjustment to a different schedule. While still freelancing the way I did in Florida, I’m looking for full-time work. That search, plus my transitioning from central to mountain time and having to drive the girls to school rather than send them on the bus now, has thrown me off my blog game.

Part of my recent absence, too, comes from a continued inability to wrap my mind around the fact that I live here now. Here. Wanting to write about that keeps getting in the way of what I should be posting on an asthma blog, so I end up writing nothing.

Thus, this lengthy post in which I pour out the contents of my brain so I can clear it out for the usual agenda of asthma, air quality, air quality politics, and other related health posting.

Trails & Parks
Of course I had done some research on the Denver area before Mr. Asthma Mom accepted a job here last summer. I’d read this area has a reputation for a massive parks and trails system, as Front Range residents tend to be very outdoorsy with 300+ days of sunshine annually. During my one-week visit last July, I remember seeing people walking, biking, and jogging everywhere, all the time.

But nothing – nothing – could prepare me for the everyday pleasure of living someplace with hiking and biking trails just a few minutes’ walk or drive away. I mean that literally. At the end of my cul-de-sac, I have access to a trail that faces the Front Range and parallels an open space park. Just a 5-minute drive away is a huge, hilly lakeside park with wide views of the foothills and the snow-capped peaks above, 3 playgrounds, the local library, and trails crisscrossing the whole thing and the fields behind it.

That’s not even counting trails in the rest of this county and any adjacent ones, nor the hiking paths into the foothills that are only a 10-minute drive to my west.

Urban Planning
I’ve written a bunch of articles about smart growth and sustainable urban planning for my Celsias.com gig. It’s a subject I got interested in as I started thinking about – and advocating for – better ways to live that don’t damage the air or water or land for our children. Learning more about smart-growth communities helped me figure out where and how I wanted to live, and it wasn’t in the city-suburban model like my former Florida town.

Here, instead, are a bunch of mini mixed-use neighborhoods that circle the one large downtown in Denver proper. Although I have easy, multiple access points to trails and parks and the foothills, I’m also convenient to shopping districts, medical facilities, business parks, and other city-center amenities. For example, the girls and I went rollerblading in that enormous lakeside park last Saturday, but we also drove to a farmer’s market, a Starbucks, and an outdoors store within 10 minutes of leaving the trails.

Exploring our new neighborhood means I haven’t gone into downtown Denver yet, but a light rail station nearby will get me there easily enough if I don’t want to drive.

Schools
My kids got great educations in Florida. We lived in an excellent school district with dedicated teachers who challenged them and enriched their lives. The schools themselves, though, can’t touch Colorado ones for all the extras. From after-school art enrichment programs to student laptops to a school dog to a high-quality gym complete with rock-climbing wall, the facilities for public schools here far outpace those in my old community.

Weather
Mr. Asthma Mom wasn’t exaggerating. Fifty degrees in this dry climate feels worlds warmer than 50 along the wet Gulf Coast. I can walk around in a fleece in the mid-40’s here and feel perfectly comfortable, something I could never do in Florida. I am cold sometimes at night, as the temperature usually drops by a drastic 30 degrees, but during the day I’m comfortable.

Whether that remains true during non-mild winters remains to be seen, but long-time Denver residents tell me it’s so sunny and changeable here that winters here aren’t as harsh as non-Colorado residents think they are.

We’ll see, this Florida girl says.

The Rockies
They’re indescribable, really. If you didn’t already know, Colorado has more miles of national park land than any other state in this country. So it’s not just the trails, the parks, the mountains, and the red rock formations. It’s the whole package, and I haven’t even been skiing or snowboarding yet.

In Conclusion
I found things to like and even love throughout Florida, but I’ve always known it wasn’t home. Colorado, however, may be – not just because I love it so far, but because I think seeing everything this state has to offer must take a lifetime.

I don’t plan to leave. Maybe one day, in a harsher winter, I’ll get weary of the snow or long to live on a coast again, but that’s hard to picture.

Colorado is the first place I’ve ever been content to live in now without looking towards the next place to go.