Bigger, Better, Boulder
At long last, my article on Boulder, “This City is Better Than Yours” is out this month in Traveler (PDF to come, don’t worry). The online version went up today, complete with its very own slideshow, and this is my favorite photo. Excellent work done by Joanna Pinneo, who shot the piece.
Boulder is a fantastic town, and yes, it’s very easy to imagine packing your bags and living there (the girl who fact-checked this piece literally did just that as we closed the issue). At the risk of quoting myself, here’s the intro:
It’s been called the smartest city in America, the thinnest city in America, the best place for a runner or an überjock, and the top green and clean city in the United States. You have to wonder: Where is this perfect place? To find it, head about an hour’s drive outside Denver to Boulder, Colorado, a city of 100,000 people and a university town at the foot of the Rockies’ Front Range. “You’ve got 45,000 acres of open space and a hell of a natural park,” says Jim Philips, a naturalist for the city of Boulder, explaining its charms. But that’s not all: “It’s the air and the mountains—it’s everything.”
Really though, the moment I knew this city was kind of “perfectville” was at brunch one morning at the Dushanbe Teahouse. A 10-year-old sitting across from me was wearing a medal and had numbers written down his leg. After I finished my yummy meal, I congratulated the kid on his medal and asked what he’d done. “Swim, bike, run,” he said nonchalantly. Apparently it was not his first triathalon.
Update: See the full piece after the jump….
Photo: Joanna Pinneo
Tags: Articles, Boulder, Colorado, National Geographic Traveler, Travel