Boulder

As usual, Mary Joy has one Sunday in October off, so we took advantage of that to get out of town. A price of $139 round-trip to Denver was too good to pass up, so we are taking a long weekend in Colorado. The flight to Denver is supposed to take about 2 hours, but we got in early, around 10:10 a.m. But, of course, it took us a while to get our car. We had a very good deal on an intermediate-level car (total: $78 for four days) from Alamo, through AARP and Expedia (being old is worth something sometimes!). The pleasant guy at the desk tried to talk us up to a larger, six-cylinder car, claiming that a four-cylinder would have problems with the lack of oxygen at these and higher altitudes. But we have taken a car over the Trail Ridge Road (highest elevation: over 12,000 feet) and we’re pretty sure it was a four-cylinder car and we had no trouble with it.

They didn’t have much of a selection for intermediate cars, so instead of the Corolla we were expecting (Mary Joy drives a 2009 Corolla), we ended up with a 2012 Ford Focus. We’ve rented Focuses before and liked them: they handle well.
The Alamo guy showed us the two possible routes to Boulder: the E-470 toll road and the slightly longer I-70 and I-270 route. We chose the latter, and got caught in construction on I-270, so it took us about an hour to get to Boulder. We went straight to the Boulder County Farmer’s Market, since it would close at 2 p.m. As it is, we had over an hour to wander around there. It is very different from the St. Paul Farmer’s Market. There is much more in the way of crafts and artisan food products, and almost all the produce is organic. There are also a number of food booths—we each had a Vietnamese noodle bowl for lunch (not bad), and Mary Joy had a ginger ice tea while I had a pomegranate ice tea. Mary Joy picked up some Christmas gifts at the craft booths, then we ate and went to our hotel.

Boulder is something like a cross between Ann Arbor, Michigan and Sedona, Arizona. It’s a college town (home of the University of Colorado), but definitely in the mountain West. It is prosperous and into healthy food and healthy outdoor activity—hiking, biking, climbing, etc. It is also into spiritual healthiness. Twice I saw someone doing Tai Chi in the parks. I also saw people who appeared to be meditating. There is another university in town, Naropa University, which may be the only university in the country founded by a Tibetan Buddhist monk. One of its schools is the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, founded by Allen Ginsberg.

We couldn’t get into our room immediately (it was about 2:45), so, instead, we walked for about an hour on the Boulder Creek Path, which is a nice and very heavily used (by pedestrians, bikes, skateboards and baby strollers) concrete trail along Boulder Creek, right through the heart of town. The weather was gorgeous, 80 degrees and sunny—very unusual for this time of year. Unfortunately, the rest of our stay looks to be more seasonal in its weather.

Then we went to the 5:00 mass at Sacred Heart of Jesus Church, which looks like it was built in the ‘70s: semicircular, with abstract or stylized stained glass. It’s a few blocks north of the Pearl Street Mall. As we got into church, a couple of minutes late, the pastor was explaining some of the changes in the English-language version of the mass. These are going into effect on the first Sunday of Advent (the last Sunday of November), but the Denver archdiocese has apparently decided to get a jump on things by rolling some of it out now. There were laminated cards in the pews, setting out the changes in congregational responses. At the beginning of the mass, these were followed, but eventually the presider had the deacon tell the congregation that they were no longer using the new responses. The Gloria, Sanctus, etc. were from a new mass by Dan Schutte, with the new language. The musicians were good—a pianist, flutist and two singers.

We went down to Pearl Street for dinner. The restaurant Kitchen was highly recommended, but doesn’t take reservations, so we spent an hour wandering up and down Pearl Street, which has been pedestrianized and has a plethora of restaurants, bars, clothing shops, bookstores (one left-wing political, one new-age, one used, one proudly independent but apparently otherwise normal). There were some of the statue-mimes, as in Europe, street musicians (including a pianist!) and a story-teller-juggler-flame thrower (I think—we didn’t really stop to see what she was doing.

Dinner was very nice, generally from local ingredients. Mary Joy had steak frites (steak with French fries), while I had chicken with round cucumbers and heirloom tomatoes. Then we went back to our hotel and I wrote here while she continued reading Les Miserables (she’s getting near the end of the second of the three volumes).