Boulder remains suspiciously nice. Cyclists, multistory independent bookstores, temperatures below eighty degrees. Even the homeless people seem to be more street performers than living indictments of capitalism; one guy has memorized every ZIP code in America, another contorts himself into a transparent plastic box, and another plays a cello while balancing on it.
Today we drove up to Estes Park for a morning horseback ride. I told Dad that this probably would not come up, but if I was thrown from my horse and fell into a coma forever, he had my go-ahead to turn off the life support. The horse in front of me enjoyed releasing a long fart every time my horse caught up to it, but apart from that nothing bad happened.
Estes Park is also home to the Stanley Hotel:
I remarked to Dad that if they'd had online hotel bookings in those days, the world probably would have been deprived of Jack Nicholson's ax-waving shenanigans.
Some TV history: Stephen King returned to the Stanley to shoot the 1997 ABC miniseries, Stephen King's The Shining, which followed the plot of the book more closely than Stanley Kubrick's film.
Scenes from Dumb and Dumber were also shot at the Stanley. Apparently Jim Carrey also stayed in room 217 for three hours, then emerged in a panic and relocated to a nearby guest house for the remainder of shooting. He never publicly said what he saw in there.