Buff Dads back from Boulder

Back from our long weekend trip to University of Colorado at Boulder’s Parents Weekend. Our time in Boulder was great fun. Some of the highlights:

• Visiting our new freshman’s dorm and spending time with him on campus and round town.


• E and I ran both Saturday and Sunday mornings along the Boulder Creek Trail while freshman son slept. We ran for over an hour each day.


• We crisscrossed the university campus 3-4 times a day. I know where just about everything is located.


• I ate my allotment of French fries for this year and next. (I have pledged to not eat another fry until opening day of Giants baseball in San Francisco. At that time I will order my own serving of Gilroy Garlic Fries at AT&T park) We drank as many local beer and micro-brews as possible at Boulder’s sports bars and brew pubs (The Sink, Walnut Brewery, and Old Chicago). It is a good thing we did all that running and walking.


• Stayed at the colorful and affordable Boulder Outlook Hotel. Self described as “the cure for the common hotel”. It is conveniently located across the street from the campus.


• E found one of the best kitchen stores he has ever come across: Peppercorn in downtown Boulder on Peral Street Mall.
  


• Attended the Colorado Buffaloes vs Texas Tech football game. I have not been to a college game in over 10 years. The Buffs have been on a consecutive 10 game losing streak. Fortunately, through the power of two gay dads cheering them on we were able to break their streak and they won the game. (I am thinking of offering our powerful gay dad cheering services locally to SU-Cardinal football team. They can’t seem to win a game this season.)

In high school I was a band geek. Notice that I didn’t take any pictures of the game, just the band and mascots.

I can’t finish the story without sharing our flight experiences. We do a lot of adventure travel…hiking, biking, etc. We were not expecting this to be one of those trips however. Nevertheless, through a series of “hilarious” missteps, we had a wacky and madcap traveling adventure getting to and from Boulder.

It all started innocently enough with a drive to the airport. We live exactly between two major international airports, San Jose and San Francisco. Can you anticipate what our first blunder was? Right! We went to the wrong airport and didn’t figure it out until we tried to check our baggage. This lead to a missed connection, a overnight stay in LA at a questionable Best Western allegedly near LAX, and verbal abuse from a crazed Yellow Cab driver. On the return trip through LAX (don’t ask why we connected through LA to travel from San Francisco to Denver…OK, in theory it was cheaper.) we had another adventure trying to find our gate when we wrongly assumed that because we booked our airline tickets through American Airlines, we would be flying American Airlines. Ha! Silly us. Unbeknownst to us, we were really on Alaskan Airlines and we should have been waiting in a different terminal at an unmarked gate. Can’t you just hear the canned laugh track roaring at our misfortune!