Social Distancing and Parks

John and I have been isolating at home for two months now. It was a beautiful day on Sunday (70 degrees) so we decided to go to a park to take a walk. There’s a park here in Colorado Springs called Fox Run Park that has a nice pond and gazebo area. We knew it would probably be busy due to all of the different closures throughout the city and the amazing weather, but we thought we still might be able to find open space to walk around in where we weren’t close to other people.

As we pulled into the park, it was immediately clear that space wasn’t going to be easy to find. Each parking lot we drove through was packed and so we ended up driving around the whole park and were able to get a good look at what was going on there. As we drove around, we witnessed multiple large groups of people gathering together. There were groups having picnics, people playing volleyball and hacky sack, and standing in clumps talking. Several of these groups had more than 10 people. To make matters worse, none of these people were wearing masks either. I expected the park to be busy, but I hoped it would be mostly full of people doing what John and I wanted to do, which was going to be just the two of us walking around, keeping our distance from others. Aside from the fact that keeping social distance from others is considerate and the right thing to do right now, there’s also a public health order about gatherings it and it was frustrating to see so many people ignoring that. The only people I saw wearing masks there was an elderly couple, which bothered me because no one there was wearing masks for them.

Needless to say, we weren’t comfortable with getting out of the car. It was disappointing because it was the first time I had been out of our neighborhood in weeks and I was looking forward to walking around the park. We decided to just drive around Colorado Springs instead. While we were driving, we ended up stumbling upon an area we’d never been to before. I had wanted to go to the other park because of the pond. I love walking around near water, it’s so relaxing to me. The area we stumbled upon was a park within a neighborhood surrounded by a beautiful lake! And there were only a handful of people there and everyone was spread out. Score!

There was definitely a difference between a neighborhood park and a city park in this case. The gazebo, playground, and several park benches were taped off. I took a photo because I’m interested in documenting things like that. It’s all going to be in history books someday, which is weird to think about.

On one side of the lake is a dirt trail and on the other side is a private ranch. As we walked along the trail, we walked right past some of the cows from the ranch.

There’s a fence there but it’s hard to see in the picture. I decided to pick out a cow to be mine and I’m going to look for it the next time I go to this park. :)

Discovering this park unintentionally was such a wonderful surprise and something my heart needed. We had just had a particularly stressful past few days and I think it helped us to turn the corner on the difficult days we’d had. I’m happy we didn’t just go home after the discouraging scene happening at the other park. I think we’ve found our new local happy place.

As we were driving through the first crowded park, I reminded John that there are still lots of people who are being careful like we are. They’re just not at this park. When you go to the comments sections from news pages on Facebook (which can be so toxic, ugh) or you drive past a bustling park, it can feel like you’re the only one who cares about social distancing, wearing masks, and just plain being considerate of other people. And unfortunately, there are a lot of people who are stubborn and inconsiderate out there and YIKES, they are really showing their true colors right now. It’s disappointing to watch. But still, if you take the time to really think about things and pay attention, you’ll also see that there are tons of people who are following guidelines because they want to do whatever they can to help stop the spread of the virus and protect others.

So if you drive by a park and you can see that people aren’t being smart about things, don’t give up after seeing that. Try going to smaller parks in outlying areas rather than major city parks and things might be better there. Fingers crossed for you.

Have you found good places to get outside during COVID-19?

-Emily