Cordillera

JUST AN FYI, THIS IS A POST FROM MARCH THAT I NEVER PUT UP!  ENJOY!

I am sitting here at work and have not served more than 10 people all day.  It's a huge change from serving 75 people in the morning alone last week!

My job, if you don't know already, is a server at Cordillera Lodge and Spa in Edwards, CO.  Having been a server for almost 4 years now, I have come to appreciate this job.  I've decided that I love people too much to move on to a desk job.  I call this season of life my "love food, love people" season.  :)

Cordillera is Spanish for "Range of Mountains" and the surrounding Sawatch Range, Gore Range and others are the exact reason for the name.  Every morning I work I am in awe of the sunrises that unfold.  They have been different every day.

I haven't brought my camera inside the lodge yet, but I did get a picture of the view from the parking lot!

 

 You can see Vail's back bowls in the distance...I am so blessed to work at such a beautiful place.  I will try to get pictures of the Lodge hopefully soon!

I'm not a morning person, as many of you know, but somehow I've come to love the mornings here!  I set up by myself so the quiet of the morning and the sunrises give me time to focus through prayer.  I've never been able to start my day like that and I feel much more awake and happy when I take that time for quiet reflection.

My shift is from 6am to 3pm so I usually only work 4 days out of the week unless we have a lot of guests.  This past month of March I was overtime every week because of how many guests we had.  March is called "Spring Break Month."  It's literally "Kids Gone Wild" month to me.  Good thing the Ranch prepared me well to love and serve kids!

After getting a call when I was home for Christmas, I was interviewed the day after I moved to Edwards and was hired on the spot!  My new roommate (who I had found through an ad for the condo) works down in the Spa area of Cordillera so she was the one who told me that there were positions available!  I still can't believe I didn't have to wait longer than 24 hours to find a place or a job!  Kind of ironic that I still can't manage to find a desk and a bed after all of these months.  Haha!

Work since then has been a whirlwind of activity.  Cordillera is a hotel, so I know how to deliver room service...most interesting of jobs because of the unusual situations you can find yourself in...We also serve people in the spa and at our pools, so a busy day could find me literally running from one end of the hotel to the other while also serving tables in the restaurant...I'm so glad that I am a multitask-er or else I would've been forgetting things left and right!

The clientele that stay at Cordillera are usually on the upper side of rich.  There are 750 homes in the gated community of Cordillera, but only 20% of those are year-round.  Not only do we serve our in-house guests, we serve those surrounding homeowners and our members of the Cordillera Club as well.  I have handled the "unlimited" credit cards in my hands on more fingers than I count.

The curse and blessing of tips have been introduced to me as well.  When I started working I hated the thought that servers were only nice to the guests because they were trying to get a better tip.  It was a competition in the end to get the higher tip out of the guests.  There is no going around the fact that I rely on those tips as payment now, but I hate it!  

This is just one of many sunrises I get to see!  I love Colorado.