What if you could go to a place where the sun shined 300 days out of the year? A place covered with 2 feet of snow before Halloween and somehow miraculously a week later you found yourself wearing shorts and dripping sweat, that's right all of a sudden its 74 degrees in November. A place where 90% of the population is physically fit, and goes running, hiking, biking, climbing, skiing and snowboarding on a regular basis. Maybe this does not fit the description of your ideal place, but for me, this is my Utopia.
Well, the reality is YOU CAN go to that place. You can go to any place you want. Too many people I know are stuck in dead end jobs in a gray boring place they don't enjoy. Growing up in Vermont was awesome, I could not have asked for any other place to be a kid. Vermont is a great place and I would never trade my experiences there. However, as people change and grow up, it is good to experience living in other places. Most people do this when they move away for college. I ended up staying in Vermont and attending Champlain College. Champlain gave me a great experience to shine and grow as a person, but at the same time I also felt like I was not experiencing other places the way other people my age were at the time.
A few months after graduating I decided that I really needed a change. I needed to experience life outside of Vermont. It's not that I wasn't happy or didn't like the beautiful city of Burlington, it was that I wanted to explore and find new places, meet new people, and climb over new hurdles. Burlington is a small place. I found myself running into people I knew everywhere I went, even desolate gas stations in the middle of nowhere.
Moving to Boulder was a big step for me. I had never lived outside of a 7-8 mile radius within the confines of the Burlington, VT area. In September 2009 I found myself in Boulder, living a new life, new job, making new friends, and embracing a new lifestyle. I have been here for nearly 5 months now and have neglected to write about it. Recently I came into contact with several people who are avid bloggers, they read, write, repeat all the time. I was never really a reader or writer. I am more of a talker, I love meeting new people and talking to them. Live conversations are how I typically like expressing myself. This is probably why I haven't gotten around to publishing this blog post for so long. I actually wrote the first paragraph on November 11, then saved it and forgot about it. Right around that time things were really starting to pick up for me in Boulder. I was making a lot of new friends, shortly after I became a member of the Boulder Snowboarding Group, which has brought me an awesome growing group of friends that I can ride with on the weekends.
Last night I attended Ignite Boulder 8. For those of you who aren't as familiar, it's a night of presentations on a variety of topics, each presenter gets 5 minutes to present their topic with slides automatically advancing every 20 seconds. Watching some of these presentations amazed me. But what was even better, was meeting all the other people who attended. These are normal people like me, with similar stories of moving to Colorado. People who love "geeking out" and talking about social media for hours on end. People who love the outdoors and relaxed lifestyle. It was great to connect with people who know what it is like to have that deep drive to find and explore new places.
At last I did it, I buckled up my backpack, tied my boots and began my adventure. So maybe my adventure differs from yours, but for me, this is my Utopia.
