Back on Campus

Snowy weather while driving through Colorado from Utah kept me off my bike, and out of the higher passes, so I went straight to Boulder where I snagged Thomson out of his Billabong store,
ate a fired-up dinner at my favorite sort-of-Mexican restaurant in Boulder (Tahoma), and picked up Beth and Brittany (where's Will?) at the Denver airport, which is nowhere near Denver, but it could be if they would move it west about fifty miles.Beth and I stayed in a cozy inn she found in Boulder Canyon, while Britty practiced for college by crashing on T's futon sofa.

Rain in Boulder?! Yes, Thomson has said it happens, and now I've seen it. Beth and I braved the drizzle, and walked a few miles through Boulder Canyon on Boulder's ubiquitous recreational trails. Boulder has big time taxes, and they spend a lot of the money on acquiring and managing green space, and that means it's a friendly area for hikers and bikers.

This was a high-level business trip for Brittany, featuring her much-anticipated first visit to Target (it fulfilled her dreams),
and with official visits to Colorado College and University of Colorado... two very different schools.

Britt was one of five Gould Academy students touring the Colorado schools this weekend, including three on her CU tour. Imagine their delight when they had the opportunity to pose for this pic! (Hey, yer good kids... thanks!)Britty did a great job checking out these schools, and it's good she has this head start as a junior. She's interested in lots of different kinds of schools right now, and she quickly figured out all the differences, advantages, and disadvantages of CC and CU. It was a fun and interesting start to the search process, and not at all the feared horror show of dragging around a mute, amorphous lump in the back seat of a rental car!
And luckily, we were roaring around in the luxury of Thomson's Thunder Truck, since The Little Red Diesel is a little crowded these days!
Other trip highlights included a tour of Thomson's Boston Red Sox hat museum, and a screening of the new movie from Krakauer's Into the Wild book. My thoughts about McCandless's wreckless life and death have mellowed a bit since the book came out about ten years ago, but it's still a disturbing and mysterious story.

Some of my better Life Moments have been on the sidewalk at Boulder's Cafe Roma, in the brisk, dry, early-morning Colorado sunshine, with a large mocha and a croissant, often before or after a day of skiing/hiking/climbing/biking in the Colorado wonderlands. (I think Thoms enjoys this habit more than this pic demonstrates.)