Freedom in a Can: Adventures with Hamlet

“I’m not so much in the cheap wine mood tonight, I want Pina Coladas!”  Shari says as we pull into the next town large enough to have both a supermarket and liquor store.  We’ve been able to avoid most of winter, unlike much of the country which has had to deal with winter’s long slow end.  Right about the time we were entering Boulder in late March, we thought that we’d missed most of it.   Ol’ Man Winter, it seemed, had other ideas.     Four feet of snow fell while we were in Boulder, about a foot each week.  We’d thaw out from one storm, the mud on the farm would begin to dry, and just as we were feeling like we could walk out into the driveway without boots on, the barometer would drop and we’d get another foot.  We thought, let’s go south, it can only get better, right?   We drove up into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Southern CO, and bam, snow hit us over night, causing us to make breakfast in the trailer again.  After a couple of days there, we did an end run arou

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Do one thing every day that scares you.”  Sometimes I wake up in the morning and lie in bed planning such an activity, and other times it finds me.  Last Sunday was indeed the latter. When we arrived at the Alvarado campground at the eastern side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, we once again found ourselves to be the only ones inhabiting the area.  Not even the Camp Host had arrived for the season yet.   Hutch had been telling me about these mountains since we entered the state of Colorado weeks before.  He had very special memories of the area near Westcliffe and wanted to revisit a trail that he’d never been able to finish.  He described the Sangre de Cristo range as “spiritual” and full of “thin spots” --  places where you feel a heightened sense of spiritual awareness.  For some, these thin spots are in churches, and for others, on mountain summits.  “I can’t wait to take you there so you can experience that too,” he told me for a few weeks be

My siblings and I shared at least one experience when we moved out of the house and into our first apartment after college.   Along with all the usual new household purchases, we bought a quart of the good orange juice – the expensive kind with lots of pulp.   It might be only a one-time splurge, but for now this juice was ours!   Growing up with 3 others, such luxuries were divided into tiny glasses and only accompanied breakfast.   But when I bought it, I’d drink my juice whenever I liked, and straight from the container, thank you very much.   I first bought the expensive orange juice in Boulder, Colorado from 1995 to 1997.   As a destination, it was a bit like Mecca for me, not just for its proximity to mountains, its sunshine, or its famously “open” atmosphere, (many a young middle-class adult made a similar pilgrimage growing their hair into dread locks and eschewing their parental resources to live off the street in Boulder in a 90’s re-visioning of Haight Ashbury – “trustafari