Quist World Tour

One of the best things about driving rather than flying across the country is watching the land change. In Michigan, we drove through forest and farmland, and we knew that not so very far away was the Lake Michigan shoreline that we know and love. When you get past Chicago, eventually the land opens up to the farmland (corn and wind, as far as I can tell) of Iowa and Nebraska. Northeast Colorado brings you through what is usually dry ranchland, but this year the heavy rains have turned Colorado green as far as the eye can see. It’s startling if you are expecting yellow grasses to cover the hills. As we got closer to Estes Park this week, we noticed first a lot of cows roaming the land, and then between Sterling and Greeley we saw more of what might be the factory farms—enormous numbers of cows in small fenced-in areas. Those farms you can smell before you see them. Today we drove from Estes Park to Arroyo Seco, a small town near Taos NM. Along the way we passed the Rocky Mountai...

I’m spending a long weekend with my sister-in-law in Colorado Springs, which might sound more exotic than it is. Normally, people go to Colorado Springs to go see the amazing Garden of the Gods or ride the cog rail up to Pike’s Peak. There’s the Air Force Academy and the Olympic Training Center too. The upside of having a sister far away is that you get to visit that cool place a few times, and I’ve been able to do all of the above in the past—Colorado Springs has lots to offer. This time around, though, I’m just here to hang out with Julie. And Julie is a working mom with a couple of young kids, so life is busy! While she’s been working, I’ve been running some errands—getting boots for her daughter, dress shoes for her son for the Christmas concert, etc. Generally, when I travel somewhere, I find it sort of depressing when I see that I could go to all the same stores and restaurants that I could visit at home. However, when you are running errands, this simplifies things...