DAY 12 TUESDAY MAY 29 TO BOULDER AND BACK

Sally and I took Aiden to school then hit the highway to Boulder. We had breakfast at The Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse. Beautiful decor and dozens of teas. Dushanbe is a village in Tajikistan and is a sister city of Boulder. More than 40 artisans in several Tajikistan cities created the elements of the Teahouse’s interior, including the hand-carved and hand-painted ceiling, tables, stools, columns, and exterior ceramic panels.

The view right above my head.
We then headed to Chautauqua Park to catch a trail that afforded a great view of the Flatirons (So named because pioneer women settlers though they looked like the flat irons used to pressed clothing.). Again, we felt the effects of altitude on this hike. The scenery is really pretty, so much greener than some of the landscape we had been seeing. Up, up, up we hiked. Sally had done this hike years ago. We wouldn't get as far as she had in the past because of, yes, another storm. Another hail storm to be exact. This time we didn't have the protection of the car. We donned our raingear but hail is still cold and wet on bare legs.
The Flatirons.






Um, another storm approaches.
Laugh now, Sally, but in five minutes the lightening will give us second thoughts about continuing. Three minutes after that the rain will force us to break out the rain gear. And one minute after that, we will be hiking quickly through a hail storm. Hail is cold. Hail stings when it pelts your legs. The ground around here must not be used to too much moisture because it did a horrible job of absorbing this storm. So we headed back to the car as quickly but as carefully as possible, dodging running water on the trail. We were well into this hike so it took us a while to reach the car. The rain and hail had ceased before we got back to the car but the chill in the air remained.

After the hike we wanted a warm place to explore and we wanted coffee. We headed over to the Pearl Street Mall, a pedestrian shopping, dining, arts, park area. Check out the Pearl Street Mall Live Cam. Many of these buildings are old and historic. We stopped in to a couple of bookstores, including Boulder Book Store. The attached BookEnd Espresso Café makes really good coffee and the cookie we shared was heaven.




On the drive back to Denver we listened to 102.5 KCUV, a radio station Sally has been listening to for years. Luckily, she can hear it any time she likes via the Internet. Once back home, Sally and I made dinner for us all and we had a nice relaxing evening playing with the critters and wrapping our brains around Aiden's master riddles.



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