My sister Sherry recently joined a Facebook group called "You Know You're from Colorado When..." Well, I looked at that site and a couple others, edited the respective lists for realism, propriety and relevance to my own family -- and then even added a gang 0f my own.I thus present my collection of "You Know You're from Colorado When..."
* Your sense of direction is: West is toward the mountains, East is away from the mountains, North is the mountains on your left, South is the mountains on your right.
* You have absolutely no accent at all.
* You've gone off-roading in a vehicle that was never intended for such activities.
* You get really ticked off when people confuse Colorado with Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, or any of "those other big square states out west."
* You know what a "fourteener" is but you don't know what a "turn signal" is.
* You know who Alfred Packer, Molly Brown, Baby Doe Tabor, Chief Ouray, Spider Sabich and Floyd Little are.
* You never pack away your coat and sweaters.
* When people out East tell you they have mountains in their state too, you just laugh.
* You don't care that some company renamed it, the Broncos still play at Mile High.
* You grew up planning your Halloween costumes around what would fit over your coat.
* Several times a summer you hear your kids talking about going to Red Rocks for the concert.
* You wake up to a beautiful, 80 degree day and wonder if it's going to snow tomorrow.
* When giving directions, you never say "Turn left, turn right", it's always go west, then south.
* The mountain bike on your car is worth more than your car.
* It snows 5 inches and you don't expect school to be cancelled.
* Your most serious Y2K fear was running out of Celestial Seasonings tea and trail mix.
* If the humidity gets above 25%, you consider it "muggy".
* You own a big dog named Aspen, Buck, Cheyenne or Dakota who wears a bandanna around his neck.
And here's my additions. "You Know You're from Colorado When..."
* You've tried various diguises in order to get multiple draws following the Coors Brewery Tour.
* You don't like fruit-flavored soda but in the 70s and 80s you still drank Orange Crush.
* You don't consider it a paradox to go from your car heater to your car air conditioner (and back again) in a 12-hour period.
* You've discovered that the giant UFO hovering over Golden is actually the "M" of the Colorado School of Mines.
* You still don't get it when visiting family relatives get migraines, throw up or faint dead away when you drive them up to Pikes Peak or Trail Ridge Road. (Altitude sickness.)
* You bought a car from a Super Bowl MVP.
* Your parents took you to Tiny Town and you wonder what on earth made them think you'd enjoy it.
* You've bragged to out-of-state relatives that you've climbed the high rocks at Garden of the Gods and Red Rocks, hiked most of the fourteeners, been at a party at Kurt and Goldie's Aspen home, rescued Mike Shanahan out of ditch in a blizzard, chased away both a cougar and a black bear off your back porch, and had James Dobson over for a prayer meeting.
* You took definite sides when it came to the Denver Post vs the Rocky Mountain News.
* You only go to Central City (or Casa Bonita, or Royal Gorge or the U.S. Mint or any one of a dozen other interesting places) when out-of-state friends or family come to visit.
* You've enjoyed the most beautiful sunsets and most thrilling thunder clouds ever seen from a baseball stadium.
* Though standing on the ground, you've been able to look DOWN on birds and hang gliders.
* You've convinced your out-of-state cousins whom you're taking on a mountain picnic to watch out for starving coyotes, crazy cave dwellers, and stampeding herds of jackalopes.
* You hate a skunk under your porch but not as much as you do the Oakland Raiders or Kansas City Chiefs.
* You know the tragic legend of "The Face on the Barroom Floor."
* And I close with this one. You know you're from Colorado when your relatives visit you a heck of a lot more than you visit them!
