As I looked up at the sun setting, as the last fires of the day glow across the first (or is the second) Flatiron, I couldn't help but think that my stop in Boulder was a nice vacation from my bike tour vacation. Actually, my tour is not a vacation; it is travel, which is a completely different beast from "vacation."
So what I have done during the vacation in Boulder? There was the catching up with old friends from U.C. Berkeley and the Team-In-Training days in San Francisco. This was the best part of the stop in Boulder. There was the good cooking - the good cooking of newly-made friends. Spending the night in a spacious and completely empty (except for me and the dog) house in the mountains above Boulder was exciting, though not in a horror film sort of way. I think I saw Tyler Hamilton sipping tea at his house when I awoke that morning.
Boulder was an escape. An escape from reality. Boulder is a place where the rest of the world seems to fade away. It is an escape from the hectic hustle and bustle of the U.S. Boulder is in an outdoor mecca. It is a liberal-minded college town. It is a place that composts the plastic spoon that you just ate off of (of couse the plastic spoon is made out of a compostable-plastic). But everyone needs an escape from the escape sometimes.
During one of my days in Boulder, my host, Stephen, and Stephen's friend, Keith, planned a "day off" from Boulder. We tried to relive National Lampoon's Vacation - sort of. We escaed from the bubble by making a pilgrimage to Water World where we slid on the waterslides all day long. My personal favorite was the standing wave pool which was populated by wave pool grommets. I, by the way, had no skill at the wave pool. After Water World, we had a game of kickball followed by a screening of "Vacation, The Movie.
Another great thing about Boulder are the bike paths. Even in a place like Boulder, which is populated by professional bicyclists, it is still nice to get away from the cars. Boulder's bike path system allows cyclists to keep far away from the cars - a good thing as far as I am concerned. So I spent a large part of the two weeks in Boulder traveling to friends houses and to downtown via the bike paths.
This pause in Boulder also gave me a chance to catch up on some reading - The Nation, Catfish and Mandela, and The Road. All good reading material when traveling by bike. And I had the chance to see a movie at the Red Rocks ampitheatre - how about Wedding Crashers preceeded by an actual wedding ceremony and a U2 cover band?
The pause also gave me a chance to reflect on my trip and to remember the good times (for example bag pipers near the Beartooth Mountains) and bad times (reinflating my back tire 15 times while riding in Rawlins, WY). Mostly, I reflected on the bikers. Such beautiful music...
