The Trip: Part I

Disclaimer: I just got back from a brief vacation with my girlfriend in Colorado this week, so I’m going to break away from the Chicago theme for these next few entries. (Though in the end, I suppose I do tie in a Chicago theme).

Obviously, we chose Colorado for the mountains. I wanted to get away from the city for a couple days and Em wanted to go back to her old stomping grounds (she used to live in Denver). All in all, it was a great trip. We got a lot of cool things done in a short amount of time, an as vacations usually go, it went too fast.

While the front range of the Rockies is still one of my favorite places in the country, I was struck by the rapid development of the area and how much it lacked the sort of western/frontier panache I remember it having when I visited as a kid.

For those of you who haven’t been there recently, urban sprawl is gobbling up almost every acre it can from Fort Collins to Denver, and likely even south to Colorado Springs (though we didn’t go there). Heading north from Denver to Boulder, you pass a seemingly endless belt of strip malls. To use an Omaha reference point, it looks like clusters of Village Point malls stacked next to one another for miles on end. Each are filled with chains like Outback Steakhouse, Ruby Tuesday, AMC Theaters, Cheesecake Factory, Gap, Old Navy and lots and lots of banks. All ensuring that your experience out won’t be any different from say, the outskirts of Kansas City, Minneapolis or just about any other town in America.

In search of a place to eat one night (I’ll explain more later) Em and I decided to head to Loveland, a town that appears to be expanding as fast as any in the area. We wound up taking a wrong turn and drove through mile after mile of bland suburb … take that back, these suburbs were downright ugly. The houses and divisions all looked exactly the same. So much so that I’m surprised people who live there don’t mistakenly go to the wrong house every now and again. And of course, being in a barren part of Colorado, there isn’t a tree to be found: Just rows and rows of identical houses with empty brown yards.

As we drove passed we both wondered who the fuck would want to live in such a mundane environment. It made me depressed just thinking about the possibility.

This was all mostly disappointing for me because I remember the area having such a rustic mystique about it: Driving through it all as a kid I was able to conjure up visions of what it might have looked like when frontiersman, cowboys, Indians roamed and old saloons and ranches sat amidst the plains and foothills. It’s almost impossible doing that when there’s a new housing division being built in just about every place that you can physically fit one. Everything east of the mountains reminded me of West Omaha, the only difference being the vista.

Of course, once you get in the mountains they’re still as majestic as ever. That section of the Rockies is the personal favorite of all the mountain ranges I’ve seen and that includes Yellowstone, Glacier, the Canadian Rockies and everything I saw while living in Idaho. Rocky Mountain National Park has gone out of its way to preserve its original landscape, to the point to where they’ve pretty much taken down every man made structure ever built on its grounds not directly associated with the park service. The only issues is that, being such awesome park, it draws truckloads of tourists. You have to get pretty deep into it to truly feel isolated. Most of the hikes you go on there you’re within shouting distance of another human.

We stayed in Boulder one night, a town that, not unlike the areas surrounding it, is becoming more and more developed each year. The downtown area, which used to be filled with unique record, book and clothing stores and a slew of cool college bars, is now being overrun with new multi-use developments with a hiking gear chain or a Starbucks on the retail level and million dollar condos on the top. Sure, there were lots of hippies, yippies and vagabonds lounging about— as is usual with the hyper liberal town — but according to my buddy who’d been living there for ten years, the place was really starting to lose the very edge the majority of its transplants moved there to enjoy.

For the other two nights we stayed in Estes Park, a town that has managed to turn itself almost completely into a cheesy tourist trap for rednecks from across the country. (In all fairness, it could have been that way when I was there ten years ago and I just didn’t recognize it since I was sort of one of them at the time). If we could go back and do it all over again, we likely would have just stayed three nights in Boulder or one or two in Denver, because Estes had little to offer other than its proximity to the main entrance to Rocky Mountain National, which was where we wanted to spend most of our time.

We searched and searched for a respectable place to eat lunch our first day there and after walking through the whole town, ended up at some lousy café were I ate a $9 turkey wrap I could have made better at home. For some reason a preponderance of restaurants there were Italian, which I thought was a tad ridiculous. Who the fuck comes to the mountains and wants to eat Italian? Gimme some steak, pork, beans, corn bread. I can eat fettuccini all I want in Chicago. I came to the mountains for some old west comfort food for fucks sake.