This is the outside of The Stanley. The story goes that the hotel has always been haunted and while staying in room 217 Stephen King got the inspiration for his novel-turned-movie The Shining.
The downstairs area in the hotel is open to anyone who wants to look around or grab lunch at the cafe inside. However, the upstairs is only open to guests of the hotel. Last time we were there my cousin and I asked if we could just go upstairs for a minute to get a peek of the infamous room 217 but got shot down before we even finished our sentence. This time I was in the bar buying a couple bottles of the special Shining beer they brew on site and made friends with the manager. I was asking him about ghost stories and what not and he offered to take my two cousins and I upstairs for a mini tour. Someone was staying in room 217 but I got a picture of the hallway leading to the room. He told us that Jim Carrey checked into the room during the filming of Dumb and Dumber but was only in the room for two hours before he went back to the front desk and told them that he was leaving. He wouldn't tell anyone what had happened but he was freaked out enough to need an employee to go back up and gather his stuff since he refused to go back into the room. There were other tid bits of info and ghost stories that he shared. It was fun to get to go up and see what is usually off limits regardless of whether you buy into it or not.
After the hotel and a quick lunch at an amazing local pizza place we drove up into the Rocky Mountain National Park. Almost immediately we looked to our left and saw tons and tons of elk wandering through a field.
After driving around for a bit we stopped so I could build my very first snowman. I'm a California beach girl through and through. I can count the times I have seen snow on one hand and until Tuesday had never seen snow fall from the sky. I made this tiny little snowman after being ambushed by snowballs when I got out of the car.
Coming around a corner we saw even more elk coming through another field. This time we were able to get up pretty close to some of them and they weren't even slightly fazed.
This young bull was just barely off the road grazing on the vegetation, I hardly used any zoom at all to get this picture.
The rest of these are just family pictures from different look out spots around the park.
0 comments:
Post a Comment