Independence Day Weekend Adventures

This post is a bit delayed because I've been super busy. I had to share my adventures last weekend, though, and they're just as rad as the Memorial Day excursion to Colorado Springs.

When everyone around me was getting four-day weekends, I thought I was going to work all the way through it. But I somehow managed to get Friday off, and so Heather and I made a trip up to Estes Park.

We saw the Stanley Hotel, which was used as the famous Overlook Hotel in The Shining. 

If Heather were more of a horror movie person, she might have appreciated the magic of this event. They even had a Jack Nicholson impersonator to greet everyone at the door.

Coming Soon:
Immortal Mallard

There was no maze like in the movie, but there was a garden with a waterfall in the back. And we found the most bad-ass ducks we've ever seen. They're so metal.

The main strip of stores in downtown Estes is very quaint, and was super busy, no doubt because of the holiday weekend. We ate dinner at Wapiti Bar and Grill, where we were served by the most endearingly awkward guy in the world.

And we just had to stop in at the Spruce House. It's a Christmas store. Yeah, I know.

Actually, I just wanted to see if they had egg nog. They do not, but they did have a duck ornament, though, and I only bought it on the condition that the lovely lady working the register sign and date the back of it. I'm sentimental that way.

We took the scenic route back, and stopped at Hidden Valley. It was originally used by a logging company and by locals who skied on tracks left by the loggers in winter. It became a full-scale ski resort for a few decades until it was decided that even a snow-making machine couldn't keep the place open for a whole season. There's a ranger's station, though, and there are several trails for hiking. 

I super needed coffee, so on the way back through Boulder, we checked out the coffee shops that Heather was fond of, but found they were all closed. So instead, we decided to hit up Pearl Street (for my friends back in Tucson, Pearl Street is what Fourth Avenue wants to be when it grows up).

Pearl Street is one of the most bizarre anthropological enigmas which I still can't wrap my head around. A struggling artist playing his heart out on a street corner is a bit odd to see when he is ten feet from a store that sells $30 bottles of shampoo. In short, Pearl Street is Yuppie Mecca.

The highlight was definitely Cooper and Harper, two kids who couldn't be more than 14 and 12. One played the violin and the other played the guitar, and every so often they would switch. True wunderkinds.

I'm with Heather when it comes to Boulder on the whole. It is beautiful and rich with culture, and some of its city planning ideas are very neat, but it's a bit too granola for me. I love coffee, but I don't need to be spending $25 on it. Call me cheap, I guess. Something about the "culture" of Boulder just doesn't smell right to me. But nothing spells it out quite nicely enough as visiting a city with a smug, conservation consciousness, despite having sculptures with built-in waterfalls.