Chautauqua Park and Flagstaff Mountain

On Tuesday, October 18th, we were up a little early and checked out of our hotel, the Quality Inn and Suites Boulder Creek, a little after 10:00. On the whole, we were pleased with our accommodations, in room number 214. This is an old motel that has been rehabbed, but the walls are still thin. There were only two occasions when that was problematic. Early on our first afternoon there, there were visitors in one of the neighboring rooms and you could hear practically everything that was said. However, after a short time everyone left, and we never had that problem again. One night, when we were in bed, we heard a rhythmic bouncing of springs from the next room, for quite a while. But we heard nothing more than that and it wasn’t an irritating noise. I had made sure to get us onto the top (second) floor. We had to wonder about what the people below were hearing, since our floor creaked. We didn’t end up using the pool or the exercise room. But we made good use of the Wi-Fi, had breakfast in the breakfast room every morning and printed off our boarding passes from the printer at their free guest computer.

Everybody had said that if we were into walking, we should go to Chautauqua Park, so we did. Starting in Chautauqua, New York, in the late nineteenth century there was a nationwide movement to have concerts and lectures in a setting that would also encourage outdoor activities. The Chautauqua at the southwest edge of Boulder is apparently still in operation, with rentable cabins and an auditorium, next to one of the city’s mountain parks. One of the standard scenic postcard views is up the grassy hillside toward Saddle Rock and the Flatiron Mountains. We walked up that hillside, on the Chautauqua Trail, from the parking lot off of Baseline Road. When we got into the woods, we changed over to the Bluebell-Baird Trail, ending at the Bluebell Picnic Shelter. From there we followed the Mesa Trail and the Enchanted Mesa Trail through a pine forest and back down to the Chautauqua Auditorium. A very nice walk of two or three miles, though one of the other trails that we had considered taking was closed, due to daily bear sightings. Signs at the beginning and along our whole route had warned us that bears had been sighted in the area and that we might want to consider possibly walking elsewhere. But there were a lot of people out on the trails on this beautiful (if a little cool) day, including a quartet of mothers with their two-year-olds in strollers. We asked a jogger about the danger and she said that you can usually smell bear if they are nearby—there’s a smell something like skunk. She said that if we came across a bear, instead of running off screaming, we should make a lot of noise and not move precipitously. However, she admitted that she herself, when she meets a bear, tends to forget all that and do the running off screaming, instead. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as far as excitement on this blog is concerned), we didn’t run into any bear.

Next, we drove up Flagstaff Road and Flagstaff Summit Road to the top of Flagstaff Mountain, from which, someone had told us, you can see Denver. We didn’t see Denver, but the view over Boulder is impressive, and from Artist Point you can see snow-covered peaks to the northwest.

We went back down to Pearl Street and had lunch at the bar at the Kitchen. Nearly a week later, I don’t remember what it was, but I remember that it was very good.

On our way out of town, we stopped off at the hotel to pick up the book I had been reading, one of Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti mysteries, which our friend Marika had given us when we visited her in Berlin. I hadn’t been able to find it that morning when I packed, but we called the hotel after lunch and it turned out that the cleaning staff had found it, which was good, because I liked the book, Drawing Conclusions. It is very well written, and at that point I had only gotten through seven chapters.

We drove back to the airport via the toll road, which took a lot less time than the route we had taken coming up. There are no toll booths. Instead, they take a picture of your license plate and bill the car’s owner. The guy at the Alamo desk had said that Alamo would simply add the toll to our bill, along with a two-dollar service charge.

We got to our gate in plenty of time, to discover that the plane hadn’t. We were supposed to leave at 6:02 p.m., but ended up leaving around 7:15. The young woman sitting next to me was on her first air trip, which apparently was not going to end well. Her flight to Mason City was to leave Minneapolis-St. Paul at 9:55. We arrived at 10:10. She asked me what would happen. I said that if the missed connection was the airline’s fault (as it apparently was—some electrical problem with the plane), they would presumably put her up overnight in the Twin Cities, give her a dinner voucher and get her on the first flight to Mason City the next day. I hope that the airlines still do that sort of thing and that it hasn’t gone out the window with free meals.

We caught the parking lot van immediately, picked up my car and went home.