Niwot, named after the Southern Arapaho Chief Niwot (killed by the Colorado militia at the Sand Creek massacre in 1864), was so small that at first we passed by the Old Town without seeing it. Eventually, we ended up visiting a small gallery whose owner, enthusiastic about her village, told us its history. It was an old railroad town, where farmers had dropped off sugar beets for shipment. Alfalfa had been stored in a building across the street, until it had burned down so many times due to sparks from the steam engines landing on dried alfalfa that they gave up and moved it somewhere else. But now Niwot was a cute bedroom community for Boulder, with some very nice and pricey housing.
We went back to Celestial Seasonings and took the tour, which began with a nine-minute film. The company was started in 1969 out of the homes of some locals who gathered herbs in the fields and mountains around Boulder, packaged them in hand-sewn bags and sold them as herbal teas. In a few years they were operating out of a barn, and eventually they were so successful that they built this highly-mechanized factory, that now, with only 100 line workers, could produce ten million teabags a day. We were given
hairnets (and some of us beardnets!) and were shown various parts of the process. The highlight, however, was the Mint Room. Generally, Celestial Seasonings buys only whole ingredients and grinds them all in the factory. One exception is mint, which they buy from growers in Washington State and have ground there, so that it’s shipped to the factory ready to mix with the other ingredients. The problem with mint is that if it were ground in the factory, the menthol oils would escape and contaminate everything. When our guide opened the steel door to the room where they store bags of mint, we were hit by a wave of pure, evaporated menthol, which blew our sinuses clear. Going into the room and standing by the sacks was too much for some people, so they had to leave, eyes watering. Our guide said that the room, which was less than a third full, was usually much fuller, and the intensity of the menthol fumes much stronger. I liked it. All the sacks currently in the room were marked “Peppermint,” and that was the unmistakeable smell—not spearmint or catnip, which they also use.The tour ended, of course, in the store, where we stocked up on boxes of various teas (not kombucha, though they had that).
Then we went downtown and had lunch at Med, a very nice Mediterranean restaurant. I forget what we had, but remember that it was very good.
We went back to our room and Mary Joy had a short nap, while I blogged. Then we went to the Dushanbe Teahouse for afternoon high tea. The teahouse was a 1987 present from Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, to its sister city, Boulder.
The ceramic tile exterior and painted and carved plaster and wood interior were hand-crafted in Tajikistan, assembled there, then disassembled and shipped in pieces to Boulder, where it was reassembled in all its riotously colorful glory. And yet, as Mary Joy pointed out, the whole ensemble had a relaxing effect. In the middle of this lovely space, we had a typical English high tea, as invented (as a 
card explained) by a Duchess of Bedford, in order to keep up her energy between lunch and dinner. It’s a small world—we had only weeks before seen the statue of a Duke of Bedford in his real estate development—Bloomsbury, in London. We had the house green tea and an expanded Earl Grey (black tea with the usual bergamot, but also with other flowers) called Lady Grey’s Garden, which we liked very much (we ended up buying some to take home). To time the steeping of the tea we were given a tiny three-minute hourglass. The food came on a three-leveled tray: at the bottom were lemon scones, along with artichokes in pastry shells. The second level had tiny cut sandwiches: cucumber and butter on white bread, a southwestern spread on brown bread. At the top were yellow cake with white icing, chocolate cake with chocolate icing and chocolate balls lightly sprinkled with a red dust that gave a shock to the mouth—cayenne pepper! To put on the scones there were strawberry jam, lemon curd and Devonshire clotted cream.We followed this with a short walk, to use up some of the calories, then back to our room for a short rest, then on to a movie at the big 29th Street mall. It took us a while to find our way to the theater. The movie was one that I had wanted to see, The Way, starring Martin Sheen and written and directed by his son, Emilio Estevez. It’s about a California ophthalmologist whose estranged son is accidentally killed in the French Pyrenees at the start of walking the 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago, the thousand-year-old pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James at Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. Sheen’s character, Tom, goes to Europe to pick up the body and, impulsively, has it cremated and sets out to finish the pilgrimage for his son, leaving the ashes all along the route. Along the way he has various adventures, eventually sharing the walk with three odd ducks—a gregarious Dutchman who is doing it to lose weight, an angry Canadian woman who is doing it to quit smoking and an Irish travel writer who is doing the walk to try to cure his writer’s block. Mary Joy and I liked this film very much. We were in Santiago in 2005, but we didn’t walk to get there, except on the jetway to the plane.
We went back downtown to get something to eat. We couldn’t find the place we were looking for, so we got into Med again just before the kitchen closed at ten. We both had a very nice chicken Burgundy soup, and then went back to our room.
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