We departed Curt Gowdy State Park for our short drive to Ft Collins, Colorado. I spent some time in Ft Collins at Colorado State University back a long, long, long time ago. I haven’t been back to visit the university since my college years so we thought we would take a trip down memory lane. I only wish my roommate at the time, Barb, had been with me to take the trip! Barb and I had a blast when we were there!
Since we were only going to be here a short time we decided to stay at a KOA not far from the university. We went to the KOA Lakeside-Ft Collins on the north side of town.
RV Park: KOA Ft. Collins/Lakeside
Location: Ft. Collins, Colorado
Site: 163 – pull-thru
Cost: $57.76
Services: FHU
Comments: A typical RV park which worked fine for our short stay and our “required” visit to the university. The RV Park has a lovely setting with trails, ponds, tennis court, bumper boats, miniature golf, etc. Much of this, of course, was closed due to COVID but we could still wander around the trails.
COVID Awareness: 7 out of 10. I had to go into the office to register (even though we had paid for an online reservation). KOA insists that you come in to get your map, car passes, etc. The employees were wearing masks. There wasn’t any sign regarding number of people allowed in the building (many places say only one allowed at a time) and there were no social distancing “circles”. Check-in was quick and easy and they were very polite.
I love bumper boats and had the bumper boat area been open while we were there I would have been there in a flash. The walking trails are lovely as are the ponds and fishing is allowed there without a license. There were lots of flowers in bloom and the place had a very nice feel even though it was an RV Park.
Ft Collins is a city in northern Colorado about an hour’s drive north of Denver with a population of around 170,000 people. It has an old historic downtown with houses from the 1800s and the surrounding area outside of the city is mainly agriculture and/or homes on acreages. The city sits in the foothills of the Rockies and the city’s culture is centered around the university students. Being such a long time since I lived there it was quite amazing to see how the city still retained it’s small town homey feel but the university has certainly grown! The enrollment currently is around 35,000 students. When I was there the enrollment was around 17,000 or 18,000. I could not even believe the number of new buildings and structures on campus which I shouldn’t be surprised by but I was!
Braiden Hall was my dormitory home where I lived in room 379. It was a co-ed dorm at the time where you shared a room with one other person of the same sex and it was connected to another room with 2 people of the same sex and the 4 of us had a shared bathroom. Each floor had a mixture of men and women (in different rooms). This was quite extraordinary at that time as my siblings all had same sex dormitories. My sister’s dorm only allowed men in at certain times of the day, they had to sign in, and if a man came to your room you had to have the door open and everyone’s feet had to be touching the floor. My, have things changed!
Braiden Hall now sits right across the street from Canvas Stadium. Wow! In my day the games were played at Hughes Stadium which was a distance away from the main stadium. Today I could have just walked a few feet and been at the stadium. The Canvas Stadium area also now hosts the alumni center, credit union, and the Rams team store. All was closed when we visited.
It was fun to go down memory lane but the problem is when it has been so long things don’t even look familiar anymore. Oh well. I did it anyway.
The funny part is we had studied the parking and the map to determine where visitors could park and for how long. Being summer and no school in session (plus COVID) we thought we would just park in the Stadium parking lot since it was basically empty and we were only going to be gone for about 10 minutes. We came back to our car and……Whoops!
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