Insider Travel Tips To Boulder, Colorado

Spring break! No culinary class this week. We're in bustling Boulder, Colorado. The former scrappy gold miner's town is perched on the edge of the prairie--on the last flat space heading west--before the front range raises its snowy peaks to glower back towards the rolling hills of eastern Colorado,  Kansas, and Nebraska. Beginning in 1858, those eastern states disgorged straggly streams of covered wagons to mine the Rockies for ore. Boulder began as a supply town for miners; a place to stock up on provisions, visit a house of ill repute and throw back a few shots of whiskey in one of the saloons. When I grew up in Boulder, it was a cow town where my friends went home to feed chickens and chase heifers into barns. In the 60's, the town was hit broadside with an influx of hippies who brought love-ins, drugs, organic food, anti-war demonstrations, and civil rights marches. As a young child, I held hands in the demonstrations and marches with my parents and stared wide-eyed at the flower children tripping on acid and stripping naked in city parks. It was a tumultuous time, especially in Boulder due to the sudden clash of cultures. Gradually, the town assimilated the hippies, absorbed and changed them as they grew into adults, turned them into environmental activists and owners of natural food venues and sports equipment and apparel companies.

In the last twenty years, Boulder has been gentrified and latte-fied with immigrants from California and New York who brought their wealth and their cowboy aspirations. They didn't want to get their Ariats actually soiled by manure, instead they built mansions with neatly fenced pastures for their thoroughbreds to be managed by ranch hands, and decorated their ample square footage with Fountain Formation flagstone and distressed timber. Boulder is a fun place to visit, close enough to drive to world class skiing, hiking and backpacking, filled with good restaurants, laced with bike trails and abuzz with the cultural and artistic events and nightlife of a college town. It's a brainy city, one of the top aerospace centers in the country and judged "Most Educated City In America" by Forbes magazine. It's liberal (nickname: The People's Republic of Boulder), home to the Buddhist Naropa Institute and a thriving community of Tibetan refugees.
If you travel to Boulder, here are some insider travel tips:

-first, a map of downtown

-For lunch and for a close view of the Flatirons and a nice stroll after a good meal: Chautauqua

-For breakfast or dinner: delicious Creole cooking and fluffy buttermilk biscuits: Lucile's 

-Fine dining in Boulder's most historic hotel (at least go and take a look inside): Q's at the Boulderado

-Nice owners of Indian restaurant at the foot of Baseline: Taj Indian food

-Not fancy,  just the best homemade egg pasta noodles anywhere: the Gondolier

-An absolute must-see, an authentic teahouse shipped from Tajikistan with gourmet teas and nice meals: The Dushanbe Teahouse We had butternut squash and ricotta ravioli in sage sauce and roasted acorn squash stuffed with cous cous, garbanzo beans, carrots, walnuts, roasted eggplant, and golden raisins, served with a lemon mint vinaigrette--highly recommended!

-For a stroll, go to the City Library, have a latte and take the walking path along Boulder Creek--sometimes you see trout.

-If you have a day, drive to Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Park, about 1 hour drive (40 miles up sinuous Big Thompson Canyon) to see herds of elk, beaver dams, maybe bears and breathe the thin, fresh mountain air.

THIS WEEK'S ONLINE GRAPEVINE WINE SALE:

Three small-lot, award-winning Napa Cabs, including the Corley "State Lane" which Wine Enthusiast rated 93 Points...read more!
And, Touring & Tasting has wine club sign-up incentives, like 1/2 off the first month's shipment and a free Italian-made wine tote...read about it here!