Estes Park School District Board Candidate Forum

Our local school board is elected by you, the local citizens, to represent our community values and desires for our children’s public education, while ensuring we receive the most for our tax dollars. Your vote counts!

The League of Women Voters of Estes Park (LWVEP) is hosting an Estes Park School District Board of Education Candidate Forum on October 12th from 6-8 p.m. at the Town Hall Board Room. The public is invited. The Board of Education is made up of five members of which two positions will be open this November. Four candidates will be on the ballot: Kyri Cox, Kevin G. Morris, Bradley Shochat and Brenda L. Wyss.

Do you have questions for the candidates?

We are inviting constituents (all who live within the school district boundaries) to submit relevant questions to voterservice@LWV-estespark.org by 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 5th LWVEP will choose and may reword questions based on relevancy and clarity and will ask as many questions as time allows. During the forum, and if time allows, the audience may submit written questions.

The Forum will be livestreamed and recorded and made available to the public shortly afterwards.

For more information on the Estes Park School District election go to the homepage at www.estesschools.org.

If you have general voting questions email voterservice@LWV-estespark.org.

The League of Women Voters is a nonpartisan education and advocacy organization, neither supporting nor opposing individual candidates or political parties at any level of government.

COVID is something I see in the rearview mirror. It’s still back there in the distance, but it is shrinking as I speed up in the passing lane.

I plan to continue with vaccinations as they become available, I keep a couple of tests in the linen closet (isn’t that where they belong?), I have a few N95 masks on hand in case of emergency and I put the others in a drawer for posterity (where I swear they are multiplying) —including the first one I sewed from old drapery fabric about two weeks after the shutdown of 2020.

When friends send emails saying they have COVID, I commiserate and then go about my business, knowing I’ll see them in about a week, after they’ve lived out their five-day isolation sentence (except for one friend who is still struggling with long COVID. She’s suffering from leg pain, of all things. I wish there were something I could do for her.) For the most part, the tragic Coronavirus-19 of 2020 is slowly becoming a faded memory. I’ve washed my hands of it.

I admit I’ve always had a bit of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) but when I heard from several people who returned from trips with their luggage, a bunch of fun photographs and COVID, I liked the fact that I was missing out. Of course I felt bad for them but I was happy to be on the outside looking at COVID through the wrong end of the binoculars.

And then I got on a plane and flew to California for a sisters’ trip to Big Sur. I didn’t wear a mask—because I’m done with COVID. When I got home I tested positive. Of the three sisters, the two of us who flew got COVID. It’s part of any travel package anymore. If you travel on a plane—or any mass transit—you’re going to get COVID.

No one on the aircraft wore a mask. Not one. I was part of the crowd—fitting in— and I paid for not Missing Out.

I’ve had to begrudgingly accept the virus back into my life. I used one of those tests from the linen closet. I begrudgingly got out the N95s (I’d forgotten how sniffling they are!). Joe and I are sleeping in separate rooms, using separate bathrooms, keeping all the windows open, and disinfecting surfaces we both touch like the refrigerator handle. I’ve had to cancel five days of social activities so in the end, I’m experiencing FOMO after all.

That said, while my sisters and I were in Big Sur, before the COVID curse, we had a fun time together. We stayed in a rustic cabin deep in a redwood forest and spent the days hiking along the Pacific coastline. What we did not spend our time doing was looking at our phones. Not by choice, mind you, but because we had no choice. There was no cell service or internet access along much of the curvy, narrow Hwy 1 and especially not at our cabin. We awoke each morning and picked up our devices to check the weather report and found a blank screen. We couldn’t search the internet to find the recipe we planned to use for dinner that night. We wanted to know the directions to the day’s trailhead and had to look at a paper map. (A paper map! Can you imagine?)

Each day we drove 15 miles to pull into the post office parking lot to do Wordle. (This was imperative because if you skip a day your accumulating score drops back to zero. I learned the hard way.) One of those days the post office was a stop on the way to the trailhead so we didn’t drive 15 miles just to do Wordle. And truth be told, one day we did check our phones while having an afternoon pick-me-up at a coffee shop but we kept it quick because we discovered we kind of liked the challenge of staying off the grid. We didn’t read the news, respond to email or send texts (but we did retrieve that recipe for dinner). At night we worked crossword puzzles together that Alice had brought with her—again, on paper! We played a game, we listened to music from our past (downloaded to our phones so we didn’t need connectivity), and we talked. It was as if we’d stepped back 30 years to when we started these sister trips—when there was no such thing as a cell phone or the internet. Our digital disconnecting was good for us. I recommend it.

Now we three sisters are back in our respective homes with all bars showing on our phones. I should be overwhelmed with all the email I need to catch up on, but I’m stuck in isolation for five days. What else do I have to do?

You may let The Thunker know what you think at her e-mail address, donoholdt@gmail.com.

© 2023 Sarah Donohoe

Longs Peak Reunion Lives On

Longs Peak Reunion concluded its festivities August 20th with a free picnic at the Meeker Park Lily Pond picnic area. “It was a very successful celebration” said Longs Peak Reunion volunteer Greg Raymer. “We were able to honor several Longs Peak greats, present a wonderful assortment of historic events that occurred on Longs Peak and have a fun- filled concert at Performance Park.”

Due to popular demand, Longs Peak Reunion will continue to sell their commemorative t-shirts through the American Legion Hall, located at 850 N. Saint Vrain in Estes Park. The t-shirts not only are beautiful works of art, they will make great Christmas presents for your Longs Peak fan.

Rails In The Rockies This Weekend

Explore the wonderful world of model trains at Rails in the Rockies 26th Anniversary Show this weekend, September 23 and 24 at the Estes Park Event Center, Saturday 10-5 and Sunday 9 -4. Admission (cash preferred) for adults is $10.00, children

12 and under free, and special $20 fee for families along with free parking at the Event Center and a free shuttle to downtown Bond Park Autumn Gold Festival. This show is for the whole family from little children to adults, there is something for everyone.

There are layouts featuring fine craftsmanship scratch built buildings, trains and scenery. There are layouts highlighting toy train history with Lionel and American Flyer. There is a layout constructed for the tiny Z gauge train. There is a switching layout, a puzzle layout and, of course, our popular LEGO layout. There are layouts with push buttons for our younger train admirers.

There is our popular game of Seek and Search with fun prizes. There will be a train give away on both Saturday and Sunday. The trains are generously donated by show vendors. This year we have several displays by Colorado Railroad Historical Societies and museums, and a special display of scratch built circus train cars.

If you are looking for that important piece of train equipment, a starter train set for your grandchildren, or wonderful photos of trains, we have over 15 Vendors available.

Come join us for a fun filled weekend… all aboard!