As of last Friday, your humble Travel correspondent took leave from the Star Tribune to spend nine months at the University of Colorado-Boulder. I’m a fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism, which is another way of saying after 22 years of working, I’m a student again.

Today is Freshman Move-in Day, so the streets are filled with moving trucks and concerned looking parents. I moved into a cabin at Chautauqua Park, on a hill overlooking the city. The cabin, and the whole Chautauqua complex, are National Historical Monuments, which means that for the first time in my life, I’m living in a tourist attraction. The Chautauqua was built in the 1890s as a place for mass education and entertainment; it was the internet of the day. Here, travelers came to hear great thinkers, musicians and to exercise in the clean mountain air. That’s exactly what they do today, too. (Last night at the Community Hall there was a discussion of “What exactly constitutes a sustainable diet?” And tonight, Bruce Hornsby is playing the Auditorium. ) Tourists walk across my yard, tourists stand and gape at me on my front porch, tourists talk on their cell phones much too loudly; Alice didn’t make it to the park because couldn’t find her way out of paper bag with a flashlight.

So there’s some poetic justice involved, since much of the last 22 years I’ve been a tourist in other people’s yards. I’ll continue to blog from the Rocky Mountain Bureau here on Gaillardia (not giardia) Lane, on the same eclectic mix of topics and, on my area of study here, which is mainly on how tourism helps and hurts the environment. As always, the floor is open for discussion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Boulder, animals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.