The Sullivans Find America, Boulder Edition

Boulder, CO


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:

Some literary history: in 1974, horror novelist Stephen King hit some writer's block while trying to start his third book. On his publisher's advice, he went for a vacation. September found him driving through Estes Park with his wife and son. With the road west through the Rockies already blocked by snow, the Kings turned to the Stanley. It was still a summer hotel in those days, and Steve and his family happened to drive up on the very last night that the Stanley was open for guests. They checked into room 217, Steve's writer's block vanished like an apparition, and the palatial-but-spooky building was immortalized as the basis for the haunted Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

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.