disorienting

I'm blogging from Boulder for the next few days.

I'm here for a meeting next week and I came a few days early for a mini-vacation. It's the first time in over two years that I've had more than 24 hours completely to myself (no work, no kid, no husband - not that those things aren't great but sometimes a break makes you appreciate them more - or so I hear). So far, so good.

This morning, I flew out with my coworker Jess this morning and we arrived in Denver about 2pm. She headed into town to meet up with a friend and I headed up to Boulder. After checking in to the hotel, I went up to downtown Boulder and walked around. It's such a nice treat to be able to wander in and out of stores completely on my own schedule and whim.

I had a great happy hour dinner at Sunflower, an all-organic restaurant, and did some window-shopping at several cute little stores on the Pearl Street Mall - books, clothes, paper, home decor - all very appealing but luckily, I have NO room in my bag.

I was prepared for the same weather as at home (chilly when I left and apparently now very cold and very blustery today) but was pleasantly surprised that it is seventy degrees!

After the stores closed, I browsed in the Boulder bookstore and bought a book for the trip home (which will stay in the rental car until then or I know I'll start - and probably finish - it. Hopefully, Nineteen Minutes (used for $5!) by Jodi Piccoult will be better than December Wedding by Anita Shreve, which is what I got for the trip out. I had initially planned to bring a library book (either Zen of Fish by Trevor Corson or Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates), but I couldn't really get into either of them enough to justify a 4-hour straight read. But the airport choices were pretty slim pickings too, so I ended up with that choice. I did pick up The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman during the layover and that seems to be a lot more interesting.

Unfortunately, I managed to lose my car. I usually have a pretty good sense of directions and I can look at a map and have a pretty good sense of where I am and where I need to go. I've also been to Boulder at least a few times and so I thought I had a map in my head (unfortunately, there wasn't one in the car). When I went looking for the car, I realized it wasn't where I thought I left it. When I parked it, I thought I made a careful note of where it was - in a parking garage by Walnut and Broadway, on the top floor, across from a building that said "foundry", and I thought I walked right towards the main street. But when I returned to that spot, nothing looked the same. So I walked up and down, looking at the other garages, but none of them were tall enough. After the third round of walking a 5-6 block loop, and starting to slightly panic, I decided I should probably look at the garages on the other side of Pearl Street, even though I felt fairly confident I had walked a certain way. Sure enough, the last garage that I checked was the one where I had parked. Not sure how I got myself all turned around but it was an odd sensation to have everything flipped 180 degrees.