Hello Colorful Colorado!

Rocky Mountain National Park

We arrived in Rock Mountain National Park with an early afternoon timed entry which you need in a few parks. Our main stop/hike was at the Alluvial Fan. It’s basically a stream of water flowing over a boulder field. It creates a super cool waterfall and an outstanding place to climb… or ‘boulder’.

We climbed up super high till there were no more people and it was getting to the point where it would be hard to get help if we had an accident. These girls are fearless.

I’d actually been here once before with my famous friend Devin Murphy (back when he was only infamous!). And yes, you should click on his name and buy his books. They are incredible. There’s a rumor he has another coming out soon!

After a great afternoon at the park. (We saw the biggest moose ever!) It was time to find a hotel.

We didn’t have a place to stay and Shannon really wanted to stay at ‘the fancy hotel’. (Ok, maybe I did too!) The Stanley Hotel is the hotel from the movie The Shining and was really nice. we checked out and We really enjoyed it and even played Battleship in the Parlor before we went up to bed.

There is always time for dancing at sunset in rocky Mountain National Park!

Boulder& Chautauqua

One of the few in person meetings I had booked this trip was with Rich Maloy. Rich is a St Bonaventure alum who has been an incredible help with speaking and mentoring students. He is a VC in Boulder and has a fantastic podcast called VC Minute. It’s literally one minute advice from his years in the startup ecosystem. We met up with Rich for breakfast at “The Colorado” Chautauqua. It turns out that back in the 1800’s there were a bunch of Chautauqua’s and there are 2 left. This one… and the Chautauqua Institution (CHQ) we know and love in NY. Our CHQ is definitely my happy place so I was excited to see what this one was all about.

This one is now part of the Boulder Park system and is actually very similar in architecture and feel to the NY version. It’s not gated but does have a handful of buildings that include an auditorium where the orchestra was practicing while we were there. They even have a bunch of small houses in the little streets in that area.

We had breakfast at the Dining Hall which had an amazing gourmet breakfast.

Rich then took us into Boulder and showed us around. Boulder has an amazing startup community and one of its leaders (Brad Feld) literally wrote the book on Startup Communities that we are always encouraging people to read.

Heading West

Buffalo Bill Cody’s museum wasn’t what the girls expected. No Josh Allen, no Jim Kelly, but they loved it and learned a bit of western history!

A month long trip

When you’re on a long trip.. you have to do laundry so we NEEDED to find a laundromat today. We didn’t have a hotel either so as we drove we found a place in Vail with a pool. It turns out they had a couple laundry machines right next to the pool. I don’t think many people fold laundry poolside in Vail… I was that guy today. LOL

Traveling with kids.

Traveling with these 7 and 9 year old girls has been just incredible. A trip of this magnitude of course takes planning but we also need to think about being prepared incase something went wrong.
I didn’t want to be very paranoid about this kind of thing, but I really wanted the girls to know what to do if there was an issue. I also wanted to be able to leave them for a few minutes to go for a morning run, walk, have a zoom meeting next door, or go grab a coffee.

We went through a few scenarios. (Mainly: If I didn’t come back right away, or if they were lost.) We came up with a plan on what to do in each, starting with knowing that all will work out, how to find help, when to know it’s time to go find that help and more. We spent time more on problem solving in general than specifics. That way it would be repeatable at each place.
We’d build on this conversation throughout the trip. How to figure out tricky situations, be comfortable in uncertainty and more. Hopefully we won’t have to use too much of this stuff but having the confidence to figure it out is some growth I hope they have this trip.

Each morning I usually get up before the girls and do some work and hopefully go for a run or at least go find some coffee.

This morning in Vail I had a few zoom meetings. I normally would tell them at night all the places I could be in the morning when they wake up. I forgot to last night…

Here’s the note I left this morning.

Vail is such a cool place. It almost feels like a Bavarian Disney world. The girls commented on a Disney movie it felt like. I’ve skied here a couple times but it was also a ton of fun in the summer.

We are off to Moab!