Our Halloween turned into an example of things being as good as you make them.

During the day I was feeling stir crazy, so I took a walk down the same Poudre River Trail that Dan biked on Sunday. I got as far as Salyer Park, pictured here. It’s about 1.3 miles from home, so the round trip was a nice leg stretch.

Because our neighborhood is new, rather kid-free already and also intentionally dark, we didn’t figure we’d have many trick-or-treaters. Our plan instead was to head town to Old Town and just run into some kind of Halloween action there.

I was able to scrounge up my awesome new wolf shirt, and I slapped on some eye makeup for the first time in… months? (Dan wore, at my prodding, a black shirt.)

We visited CooperSmith’s Pub, a restaurant with great significance to us. This is where our dear friends Kate and Justin took us for dinner when we visited Fort Collins for the first time. It was during that meal that I leaned over to Dan and said, basically, this is it. The root beer milk at CooperSmith’s may have been a contributing factor — think root beer float, but better. I can’t picture myself ever visiting CooperSmith’s and not ordering that damn milk. (Dan likes their root beer as it is. It’s very licorice-y.)

Old Town was a bust, as far as Halloween-y goings-on. Part of it might have been that we were there early (I wanted to head home around sunset — which, because of the mountains, means as early as 6pm), but really, no one was around anywhere. Even the restaurants were empty, which I never mind.  

On our walk back home, Dan suggested we take the Poudre River Trail back home, through a different route he’d spotted behind a museum. It ended up being as Halloween-y as I could imagine. The moon was bright, the air smelled of autumn, it was spooky and quiet. The trees cast cold shadows. You could hear the wind in the grass, and train whistles every few minutes.

This final picture was taken in the same spot as my hike that morning. It wasn’t planned that way — when I’m with Dan, wonderful things just happen. Especially if I stop trying to plan everything.

P.S. Besides Dan, literally one other person saw my wolf shirt and complicated makeup: our waiter at CooperSmith’s. He was dressed as a kangaroo.