Honeymoon- Day 2

On Monday, we woke up nice and late! It was so nice to sleep in! Then we walked down the hill to get some breakfast. We went to The Egg and I. I'd never been there before but I love breakfast so I was so excited. Since we got there so late, we were immediately seated. Sammy and I are that annoying couple who sit next to each other in a booth:) It was so unreal just being there the two of us eating where we wanted when we did. And we were married!

I ordered the apple cinnamon granola pancake. It was the best pancake of my life. Seriously. I get chills just thinking about that pancake. Sammy got an omelet which I had bites of as well. I'd never thought to put sour cream on an omelet. So. Good. We were probably so annoying sitting at our booth, moaning every few seconds because the food was zoo good. Whoever thought to put apples AND granola into a pancake deserves an award. 

After breakfast and the walk back, we were so full and in bliss that we took a nap. An hour nap. Because we could! We were on our honeymoon after all! When we woke up, we headed over to the Stanley Hotel, the part I'd been so excited for! It was an awesome tour. If I ever go again, I definitely want to take the night ghost tour! But the day tour was great as well. I am now pretty knowledgable about the settling of Estes Park and the Stanley family who are the same Stanley's as Stanley Steamer gets your home cleaner! They also developed the technology for Kodak and sold their film and developing process to the Kodak family so they could work on their steamers. Ironically, one of the brothers died in a steamer accident. I can't remember which because their names are F.O Stanley and F.E Stanley. What was their mother thinking?

One awesome fact was that there was a crossbow range on the property because the Stanley's built crossbows as well. They were preparing for the zombie apocalypse just a bit early ;)

A lot of the focus was on Stephen King and The Shining. I was so into that because, well, I'm a writer and I want to be like Stephen King. Not as scary of course. As we stood outside room 217 I waited for some brilliant story idea to hit me, but sadly it didn't. 

This is also the room Jim Carey ran out of in the middle of the night for unexplained reasons and won't talk about it to this day. There was an explosion in this room a long time ago and one of the maids was injured, but the Stanley's treated her really well afterward and she was really loyal so they think that she haunts the room. And that maybe she pushed Jim Carey away from the lady he was in bed with because she wouldn't have liked that. Hehe! 

There were stories of all the other ghosts in the hotel and their personalities and what they like to do. It was really interesting! I'm not sure if I believe the stories but it's fun to get into the spirit of things.

This is down in the employee tunnels. Creepy! I'd hate to walk through this to get to work every day. One thing that was really interesting is that the building is a floating foundation. It isn't really in the ground, so the building is constantly shifting and settling and on the fourth floor, the doors don't fit in their frames and the floor is slanted. Since the building is historical, they can't do renovations either so the fourth floor has railings meant to be the height for children so they could look down at parties. It was a bit scary being near them, they were so little!

They had an in house Italian chef who makes gelato everyday so I had to try some! Vanilla Cherry, yum :)

My three requests, Sammy, the Stanley, and food :)

This statue was awesome. During mating season they have to cover it up because the elk will come down and fight it. They discovered this during a wedding, where the bride was quite upset because people got more pictures of the elk fighting than her.

We took a drive after the hotel to try and find the old hydroelectric mill that the Stanley's had built. Instead, we found these guys on the side of the road! They war just hanging outside some houses.

I had to get a selfie with them :) 

After that, we walked around in search for awesome tourist t-shirts. It wouldn't be a proper vacation without them! Sammy helped me pick mine because there were so many options and I couldn't choose! After all that shopping, we were pretty hungry again, so we walked around downtown Estes and passed a tiny Chicago Pizza place. They had hawaiian so I was in! We took the pizza back to the cottage and watched the Bachelorette while eating together. It was a great end to a perfect day :)