A Visit To Chautauqua Park

My sister Susan and I, along with her dog Blackberry, drove up to Boulder from Denver last week and visited Chautauqua Park, one of nicest spots in that very nice city. The park consists of the Chautauqua Dining Hall, the Chautauqua Auditorium, a general store, and a number of cottages that are rented out to faculty of the University of Colorado during the school year and tourists during the summer. The best part is that the park is located just below the Flatirons, as seen in the photograph on the left, and is very popular with hikers.

The Chautauqua Auditorium, seen in the photograph on the right, hosts concerts and lectures, and years ago I attended one of those events with Susan and my mother Mary, who was visiting us from Stuart, Florida. It was a Peter Kater concert, and as I recall, we all enjoyed it immensely. Kater lived in Boulder for 13 years, and since that time has often returned to play concerts throughout Colorado. I also remember going to one of Kater's performances at the Chrysler, a fancy restaurant on the top floor of what later became the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver's Cherry Creek neighborhood, with my then wife Lisa. That was back in the early 1980s, when I suspect he was just starting to achieve fame.

When my mother used to come to visit, we would drive to Boulder - Susan and her husband George from Fort Collins and my mother and I from Denver - and have brunch outside on the deck of the Chautauqua Dining Hall. At that time, they stopped serving brunch at 11:00, and it was always exciting to see if Susan and George would make it there on time. They always did, but it was often damn close. I am guessing that I took the photograph on the left during the summer of 2002, based on the fact that Susan's hairstyle is the same as in another Chautauqua photograph from that year. I just wish I had written the damn year on all my photographs, but too late now. If you do have a chance to have brunch at Chautauqua, and perhaps even take in a concert, I would highly recommend it.