The "post" is a short booklet about a weekend trip to a cabin outside Estes Park, made so we could show family and friends what the place was like. In the days before easy internet access and sharing. As I looked through the booklet after coming across it recently, it immediately jumped out at me as a blog.
And, things have come full-circle, as blogs can now be printed as booklets...
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The version of this post that survived for 14 years was the "analog" one--the hard copy. Fitting, as it was the intended end product. The digital version is undoubtedly stored on a stack of floppy disks stashed away in deep storage; surviving perhaps, but unreadable by modern drives and software. Of course, 14 years ago that data was just as unreadable by the computers of the day unless they had PageMaker software, which of would allow a WYSWIG view of sorts in a print view setting...unbelievably crude by today's standards, using low-res video cards and monitors. Well, it all made digital sharing impractical, but those tools did allow me to create the RockCliff Cabin blog post as hard copy, which like I said, was what I was trying to do.
The pictures in the account are stills grabbed from an analog camcorder using a battery-powered device called Snappy which plugged into the computer's parallel port and the camcorder's video output.
Digital cameras and scanners were quite crude and expensive in those days, and I didn't have access to either, but I was reasonably satisfied with the Snappy set up, and used it for several years.
The pages were laid out in PageMaker and printed on special 720 dpi resolution paper on what was probably the first Epson Stylus printer, the P860A Color II.
The 860A was quite advanced in its day, the only printer offering the "high resolution" of 720 x 720 dpi. I remember we'd been watching printers closely at the time, because I really wanted a way to share and archive some of the stuff I was creating on the computer. Our printer up until then (1995) had been a tractor-fed dot-matrix, so adding a color/ ink jet instantly elevated printing to a whole new level. The printer was hideously expensive, as were the supplies, and the results were slow and often flawed, but I nonetheless loved that printer. And we kept the dot-matrix for documents for several years, so the cost was manageable.
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RockCliff Cabin is in Hermit Park, a very nice wooded recreation area in some hills outside Estes Park.
Hermit Park is currently owned and operated by Larimer County, but in 1996 it was owned by Hewlett Packard, and used as a perk for their employees. Weekends at the cabins were awarded by monthly drawings, and we were lucky enough to win quite a few stays back when Joe was eligible. The cabins were somewhat rustic and fun, set in semi-isolated lots in beautiful wooded areas. They had a propane heater, cooking burners and chandelier; small wood stove, and an outhouse. Firewood was ready to go in a big bin outside, inside was a table with benches, and built-in bunkbeds. Curtains on the windows, otherwise, bring water, food, linens, dishes, sleeping bags, and whatever else was needed. It was a fabulous place to spend a weekend, we always went in the fall, spring or winter, preferably in colder weather.
In later years, Agilent, who inherited Hermit Park from HP, eliminated the wood stoves. I think we went once or twice after that change, but we missed being able to enjoy building a fire in the stove then an evening toasting marshmallows...the propane heaters were undoubtedly safer, more convenient, required far less maintenance...but they completely lacked the charm and novelty of the stoves, which we decided were a big part of the experience for us.
Here are some pictures of the cabins today, they look as if they have been well maintained, and I am so happy to see that. They are a very nice place for a get-away, and now it's nice they're available to anyone with the price of admission, currently $60-80/ night.
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TRIP TO ROCKCLIFF CABIN (the booklet):
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Guess this post was destined to be blogged online, it just took a few years for it to happen!
