a different place

ways in which boulder is different from brunswick (or even portland, a more comparably sized city):

like most towns west of mississippi, mostly laid out on a grid. street numbers match the nearest cross street (1380 is between 13th and 14th street, 450 is between 4th and 5th).

at intersections, there are large, readable signs showing the names of both streets.

bike lanes EVERYWHERE. literally everywhere. i'm surprised there is not a lane on 36 from boulder to denver.

a pedestrian mall with lots of hip shops and very cool sculptural features on which kids can play without fear of running into street or listening to car noise (brunswick has zilch, portland, I suppose, has monument square but it just doesn't compare).

people who bike EVERYWHERE. okay, maybe not everywhere. but it sure seems like EVERYONE bikes a lot. maybe part of this is because University of Colorado is here so the students might skew it but I don't think so.

many tea shops. perhaps as many tea shops as coffee shops.

sun. did i mention sun? yesterday it was seventy. yes, that's right. it was 32 and blustery in maine. there are usually 300 days of sun. steve reminded me that he wanted to move here, but i thought the rockies were too big. sometimes, my judgement isn't very good.

green space - from downtown, you can hike/walk/run/bike into the mountains from at least three trailheads. and that's not counting the little green pocket parks throughout town.

beautiful architecture. i still don't know the exact style but the streets have a great neighborhood feel. the streets are narrow, there are always sidewalks, the houses have a low-slung 1 1/2 story frame, with enough originality to make it interesting.

of course, that very attractive housing is very expensive housing. i didn't even browse the real estate b/c i know it's crazy.

housing that keeps getting built. a few miles north of town is a canyon where our friends Josh and Carmel live. we were here in 2004 and along the road to the canyon was a very small "new urban" development that was just being built - it was about 1-2 blocks just sitting in the middle of what seemed like nowhere. Now, it is probably at least 25 blocks wide and long. aka SPRAWL. makes our new england definition of sprawl seem kind of silly. when it's dark, you can see lights in every direction for as far as you can see. lots of lights. Now, probably it would be similar in New England if there weren't so many trees and you could get up on a plateau, but there's a big difference between a subdivision with 30 houses and one with 300 houses.

radio - on the dial between 88 and 92, there are TWO spanish-speaking stations and TWO christian stations.

people. there are a lot of people here and a lot of cars. did I already say SPRAWL? it definitely does not have the feel of a small town in the same way that portland does. in the denver area, there were 1,000 new residents every WEEK for ten years during the 1990s.

and I haven't even mentioned the water issues.

that's why I like to travel. when you don't leave your state very frequently, you don't have to go far to realize how different things can be.