Boulder & the long drive north

Boulder is where the trip actually started. Until the Turo handoff that morning, we'd mostly been doing logistics — flights, hotel shuttle, a few hours of sleep. But by lunchtime we were walking Pearl Street in the kind of warm Front Range sunlight that always feels a little improbable in April, and that was the moment everyone exhaled. We'd made it. We were on vacation.

I lived in Boulder for almost two years right out of college, so any visit comes with built-in nostalgia for me. Jacqui's been a few times — we even had our rehearsal dinner here, which is a fun bit of family trivia but wasn't the focus of the day. The focus was Pearl Street with the kids: walking under the Flatirons, watching everyone else out doing the same, the town's spring-day energy doing the rest. People were friendly. The Rockies were doing their slow-burn thing on the western edge of the sky. I remembered, with a clarity that always catches me off guard when I'm here, why I loved this place.

What I'd loosely been calling "the Boulder food crawl" was really a gluten-free scramble. Sierra and Jacqui both eat GF, and Boulder being Boulder I'd assumed we'd have options. The first stop worked for Edrik — pretzel, instantly happy — but the pizza Sierra had her eye on came with cross-contamination warnings, so we punted. I sat with Edrik while he worked through his pretzel; the girls eventually found a sandwich place that actually worked. Once everyone was sorted, I walked over to Illegal Pete's for a burrito — the same Illegal Pete's I used to eat at when I lived here, a family-shaped life later. The food itself wasn't really the point. The point was being there.

We stopped at a Pearl Street shop called Falcha for souvenirs — t-shirts for the kids and me, a magnet for Jacqui — and that, plus a long walk in the warm sun, was Boulder. We knew there wasn't much waiting for us in Moorcroft, so there was no real pressure to cut things short. But eventually the road north started pulling on us, and we got back in the Highlander and pointed it at Wyoming.

The kids did well on the drive. The Colorado mountains slid out of the rearview around Cheyenne, and the open Wyoming landscape took over — new geography for both of them. Edrik had his Switch. Sierra had her phone. We saw a lot of pronghorn alongside the road, which started a debate I thought I'd settled in advance: I called them antelope; Sierra was skeptical; Sierra looked it up. They're pronghorn — apparently maybe a type of antelope, depending on whose taxonomy you trust. I conceded.

Once we crossed into Wyoming the speed limit climbed to 80 and the traffic thinned out, and the drive felt much less like a slog than the seven-hour estimate had suggested. The country opened up the way it does in the West: sky-bigger, green shifting to tan, a pronghorn standing motionless in a field watching the Highlander whoosh past.

We arrived at The Lodge at Moorcroft hungry. The room was big and spacious, three beds for four people, and we walked over to the lodge restaurant after dropping our bags. The gluten-free options were thin. Sierra still had part of her Boulder sandwich; Edrik could work from the food we'd packed. The kids made the call quickly: head back to the room, hang out, watch TV.

Jacqui and I sat at the bar and slid in just before the kitchen closed. It was a Sunday night, the place was quiet, and we were the only ones in there. After we finished eating, we ended up in a long conversation with the bartender and the cook — the kind of conversation you can really only have when there's no one else around. They had recommendations for Rapid City, where we'd be the next night and the two after that. We listened. We took notes mentally.

The restaurant being attached to the hotel was the small luxury of the night — we always pack food on trips like this, but having a bar to walk down to without leaving the lodge was a nicer option than eating in the room. With the kids decompressing upstairs, Jacqui and I got something it's hard to make happen on the first night of a family trip: an unhurried hour to ourselves. That's how road trips work, sometimes — the moment you didn't plan for is the one you remember.

Tomorrow: Devils Tower at sunrise.