Colorado Cycling Podcasts Skiing & Snowboarding Telluride The Rockies Travel: Colorado Cycling Podcasts Skiing & Snowboarding Telluride The Rockies Travel
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Telluride, Colorado: A Real Winter Wonderland
Main Street, Telluride
It’s that time of year again, the frosty season when you stand on main street in Telluride, Colorado and feel like you can reach out and touch the massive, snowy peaks in front of you. Sure, this view is nothing short of spectacular all year long yet in winter, the light and the snow render these looming monoliths even more awe-inspiring. Add to that old Western and Victorian buildings blanketed in snow, folks trudging through the streets with ski gear in tow, puppies and people practically skipping down the street—and suddently you realize it’s a Norman Rockwell scene like none you’ve ever taken in before.
Elk on the Valley Floor at the Entrance of Town
Yep, that’s Telluride and it’s no wonder once people come here, they return time after time again. I sat down recently with Michael Martelon, head of the Telluride Tourism Board, during a Travel Fun radio show program, to talk about the magical season of wintertime in this world-renowned mountain destination in southwestern Colorado. In our interview, Michael talks about the typical Telluride visitor, who they are and the Tourism Board’s approach to marketing T-ride.
“We’re the antithesis of Disney,” Michael says. And I agree, citing that the authenticity of Telluride is what I think people most appreciate here. I even go so far as to compare Telluride to Paris, two places I know and love well. Beauty, sophistication, genuineness and a funky, hip side characterize these two singular destinations in my opinion. (There’s also the City of Light connection, but that’s a whole other blog post that I hope to write soon.)
Tune in to our interview to hear about all there is to do in Telluride during the winter season in addition to skiing and riding on the mountain. “It’s just amazing the kaleidoscope of things you can do when you’re not skiing,” Michael says. This is exactly why I encourage people to come to Telluride even if they’re not big skiers or boarders. Between the charming shopping scene, our excellent spas and world-class dining, there’s more than enough to keep you busy when you’re off the slopes.
Plus, who can beat this drop-dead gorgeous scenery? You can just sit in a lodge and gaze at it from a cozy corner for hours. So much for reading a good book.
Numerous events mark the winter season in Telluride, including Noél Night and the Snowboard World Cup, a huge international gathering that also takes place in December.
Michael and I conclude our chat with a brief discussion about the USA Pro Cycling Challenge, a terrific bike race, that will be coming to Telluride in August 2012 for the finish of the first stage. Wow, that’s just one more reason for me to tout Telluride.
Hope to see you around this winter!
Click on the play button below to listen to my interview with Michael Martelon, head of the Telluride Tourism Board.
Go to VisitTelluride.com for lots of travel information, a complete calendar of events and more.
Check out these other stories about Telluride and its many attributes:
New Sheridan Hotel: Telluride’s Historic Gem; in this story I also include a brief summary of what makes Telluride so unique.
Camel’s Garden: A Telluride Favorite.
Why Telluride; a story and podcast about choosing Telluride as a ski and snowboard destination.
Snowboardcross World Cup: Telluride Goes International
Bobbi Brown’s Beauty: As Natural as the Mountains of Telluride.
Goodnight Sweet Telluride
Art & Culture Cycling Denver: Art & Culture Cycling Denver
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Hysterical in Denver
THE Most-Talented Cast of DCTC's "The 39 Steps"
I’ve been traveling tons the past few weeks and as you can see from my last blog, failed miserably at posting stories from the road. I have, however, rounded up lots of material for a great variety of pieces that I plan to publish in the upcoming weeks.
My travels began in Denver where I picked up my parents at DIA for a two-week blitz throughout Colorado and the Southwest. Stay tuned for dispatches about road tripping with seniors (average age: eighty-years young) and the wonders of the West.
My mother and I love going to the movies and the theater together. This time we were particularly well served in the latter at the Denver Center Theatre Company’s (DCTC) staging of the madcap Hitchcock spoof “The 39 Steps.” Boy, did we roar! I have never laughed so hard at the theater and you can bet I was not alone. This lightning-paced comedy has been such a hit, in fact, that “The 39 Steps” has been extended in Denver’s Ricketson Theatre through November 21st. Don’t miss it! You’re sure to be entranced by this hilarious send-up of Hitchcock’s 1935 film noir thriller in which four actors deftly take on over fifty characters. Yes, that’s right––over fifty characters, each one more amusing and convincingly played than you can imagine. The gentleman seated next to us was seeing this production for the second time in as many weeks. If I lived in Denver, I’d sign up for round two as well. It’s great to laugh and delight in such clever entertainment.
For added fun, take a Denver pedicab to or from the theatre. These three-wheeled bicycles are perfect for the mile-high city where fair weather is more the norm than visitors realize. You can hail these environmentally-friendly rickshaws outside of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts complex as well as at most other tourist attractions. My Mom and I did just that and continued to laugh all the way back to our hotel.
Denver Ricketson Theatre Tip: Order your libation before the show and it will be ready for you at intermission without the wait.
Sam Gregory as "Richard Hannay in "The 39 Steps"--just one of many modes of transportation you'll experience in this show!
From Girly-Girl to Tour Aficionado
Frenchified Tour Follower in T-ride
It’s been just over a week now that the Tour de France rolled into Paris on its final stage. If you’re at all like me, you may be feeling a bit of Tour withdrawal. Fortunately I’m in the throes of writing a book, a romantic adventure set in France (mais oui!), that also highlights the Tour de France. This way I’m on my bike and thinking about the dazzling peloton crisscrossing France most days, at least in my mind. So my Tour continues.
If you’ve read some of the recent posts in this blog, you may be wondering how such a super feminine gal became so hooked on this major sporting event. Well here’s the backstory.
I grew up with five brothers and no sisters. This meant I was destined to be either a tomboy or a priss. I became the latter. I learned French, how to tie a scarf and how to fix myself up with little visible effort put forth very early on. Eleven years of living in Paris followed. The die was cast, I had become a femme du monde of sorts, a well-traveled woman who valued the elegance and refinement a life in France has to offer.
Sports had little to do with my Parisian world; like most French women, I stayed in shape from all the walking I did in the French capital and by minimizing my portion sizes. The idea of watching any kind of a sporting event in person or on T.V. was considered by my then French husband (of noble descent) something for the masses. (Tuning into Rolland Garros, or the French Open, was acceptable, but anything else was for the most part considered plouc or hillbilly-like.)
Then I moved back to the States, discovered the thrill of road riding and met a super cyclist. I traded out my airy summer skirts and tops for an array of slick cycling jerseys and shorts, the same “silly” outfits I had seen many a Frenchmen squeezed into on Sunday rides in the French countryside.
I brought my bicycle and my American boyfriend on a trip to France and together we pedaled through the rich farmlands, the verdant valleys, the historic hilltop villages and the lush vineyards of my beloved adopted country that I had come to know so well. Yet from the seat of a bicycle I was able to embrace this glorious land in a much different way. My senses felt totally imbued with wonder and satisfaction as I crossed France’s vast fields of sunflowers, its neat rows of lavender, its bunches of grapes hanging from the vine, its Monet-esque meadows dotted with red dabbles of poppies. I readily encountered people as I passed through their villages, towns and hamlets at the tranquil pace I maintained cruising along on my bike.
Tuning into the Tour de France on T.V. seemed like a logical next step. By now I had come to know a fair amount about cycling: I understood that the sport required as much of a team effort as an individual achievement, I realized there was a certain hierarchy to be respected on each team and within the peloton and that it took great talent and lots of experience for one of those “young bucks” to become a top racer.
My American guy coached me about the sport both on and off the bike and I came to consider cycling one of the most demanding athletic feats on the planet. To me, the Tour de France, the grueling three-week bike race that takes place every July in France, seems like Wimbledon, the World Cup of Soccer and the Olympics all combined. Its international flavor also rivals the worldwide appeal of these other renowned sporting events and in the case of the Tour, the organizers put on a show that’s moved to some twenty different locales both in France and in bordering countries every day of the competition.
Enough of this jock talk. I’m a girly-girl, albeit a fairly sophisticated one. You can bet it’s the Tour’s pageantry, the awe-inspiring scenery, the beauty of the cyclists in their vibrant jerseys on their shiny, candy-colored bikes that thrill me the most. Seeing the peloton blow across vast stretches of rural France like a bright swath of Pierre Frey fabric flapping in the wind leaves me breathless. Then on the last day when they descend on Paris like a swarm of bees searching for a hive, I feel my heart quicken, my excitement mount as though I was seeing the City of Light for the first time.
All the years I lived in France, I never attended the final stage of the Tour de France on the Champs-Elysées. Ça ne se fait pas, or that’s not done, was the message that was conveyed to me by my very proper Frenchman. I never sought to explore the event on my own.
It took a move back to the States and a different perspective for that to happen. Here it’s somehow easier for me to be a fan of the Tour de France. It doesn’t mean I have to give up my girly-girl side either.
As I sit here and weave my impressions of this extraordinary event into my story, I replay the Tour’s excitement and pageantry over and over in my head. If you’re a Tour fan, I’m sure you’re doing some of that, too.
Relive Past Tours
Graham Watson, renowned photographer of the Tour de France for over thirty years, chatted with me in a Travel Fun interview. Hope you’ll take some time to listen to our conversation and/or read the story (and see some of his stunning photos)!
Being Green Cycling Paris Travel: Being Green Cycling Paris Travel
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Tour Mania Versus Zee Segway
The Segway Peloton of Paris
I’ve been thinking about whizzing around Paris these days.
It’s July and I’m consumed with The Tour. I’m referring to the Tour de France, as I’m sure you might have guessed.
I love watching the undulating ribbon of the peloton weave its way through France, but it’s in Paris on the last day of this epic bike race that this colorful procession mystifies me the most. I think it’s because Paris is so familiar to me: I’ve walked the great length of the Champs-Elysées countless times, wended my way around the expansive place de la Concorde, strolled beneath the arcades of the rue de Rivoli from Concorde to Palais Royal. Seeing the Tour de France posse (caravan, cyclists, team cars, press and officials) dominate this familiar terrain mesmerizes me the most. How incredibly fitting it is to have some of the world’s finest athletes power over the same routes reserved for royalty and heads of state.
If you’re not able to be in the City of Light on the final day of this great race, I encourage you to at least catch part of the last stage on T.V. Even the lively commentary of the sportscasters can’t drone out the pack’s thunderous rumble over the cobbles, the resounding swoosh and whir as they travel along Paris’s centuries-old streets.
If you’re at all like me, you’ll also be envious of the racers having the streets of Paris to themselves. Quel bonheur! Can you imagine how great that feels, pedaling through these historic streets at lightening speed?
There’s nothing like experiencing a place from a bicycle or I suppose, even a Segway. I’m reminded of this every time I hop on a bike but it really hit home recently when a friend told me about how he breezed around Paris standing head and shoulders above the masses. He had taken a Segway tour and visited a good number of Paris’s best-loved sites and monuments in a flash, without the inconveniences of sore feet or having to get on and off a bus a ton of times.
“You mean one of those goofy looking motorized vehicles that has you riding around town perfectly upright?” I asked.
“You betcha,” my friend replied. “They’re really cool. And comfortable, too.”
In my mind I had a hard time getting past the Sci Fi look of these two-wheeled vehicles. My otherworldly impressions of these personal transporters were further reinforced when my friend told me that you lean forward to go forward, backward to go backward.
Hmmmm. I instantly visualized my friend to-ing and fro-ing through the streets of Paris. This image was juxtaposed with a flash of the peloton rounding the top of the Champs-Elysées in a sort of hairpin turn fashion requiring the riders to lean into the turn in order to maintain balance on the bike.
“Sounds revolutionary,” I remarked, half jokingly. Yet I became truly intrigued when I learned that these Segways are driven by electric motors, a greener alternative to other personal transportation devices such as mopeds and motorcycles, both of which occupy a good amount of Paris road space along with its usual clog of motorized vehicles.
Cycling around Paris has become increasingly alluring to me, especially with the city emerging as a more biker friendly metropolis. But now I have Segways to consider. I suddenly feel intrigued, especially by the contrast of this Modern World transportation in Old World Paris.
I can’t help wondering what the Tour de France riders might think of the Segways. Cancel that thought. Fun is fun.
I made a mental note to check out these zippy personal transporters next time I’m in the French capital. For now though I’m really looking forward to cruising around Paris with the guys from the Tour on Sunday, July 25th. What a beautiful sight indeed!
Fat Tire Bike Tours Paris, FatTireBikeTours.com/Paris
City Segway Tours Paris, CitySegwayTours.com/Paris
Note that these above companies operate bike, Segway and walking tours in other major cities and tourist destinations around the world. Do check them out!
If you’re a Tour de France fan, be sure to listen to my interview with Graham Watson, renowned photographer of the Tour. You can also read about it and see some of his stunning images here.
Ready, Get Set, Go!
Cycling French Life French Provinces Paris Podcasts: Cycling French Living French Provinces Paris Podcasts
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Listen to Graham Watson Talk the Tour
2010 Tour de France Route
The 2010 Tour de France route was posted just over a month ago which means that hotels along the course are booking up fast. There’s still time, however, to plan a trip to take in some of this renowned bike race next July. Renowned Tour photographer, Graham Watson, will tell you how. Read about what I wrote about Graham and his book, “Graham Watson’s Tour de France Travel Guide,” here. You can also listen to Graham speak about the Tour and more by clicking on the play button here:
