Walk. Eat. Drink. Repeat.
Boulder resident Megan Bucholz has been guiding culinary walking tours of Boulder for two years through her company, Local Table Tours (localtabletours.com). Participants spend about two hours visiting three to five different locally owned restaurants on foot, where they’ll sample signature dishes, sip thoughtfully paired wines and chat with chefs. “I wanted to create a way for people to have more of an insider experience at Boulder’s best restaurants,” Bucholz explains.
The concept worked so well that this year, she’s expanded to offer cocktail-centric walking tours in both Boulder and Denver. ’Tail Tours last one-and-a-half hours, and provide guests quality face time with three to four mixologists. Choose from jaunts in Denver’s Larimer Square or Highlands neighborhoods, or Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall.
Cocktail mechanics like Evan Faber at Salt (saltboulderbistro.com) will whip up one to two tasting-sized drinks at each stop and spill their guts on what exactly goes into a handcrafted libation. Ask questions, pose for pictures and sample the individual spirits that went into the creation—like Honey Vodka by Spring44 (spring44.com), a craft distillery in Loveland.
“Really, anything goes,” says Bucholz. “Except running—these are walking tours.”
ARGYLE Armada
California-based writer-photographer Mark Johnson spent the 2011 season embedded with team Team Garmin-Cervélo to create Argyle Armada: Behind the Scenes of the Pro Cycling Life (VeloPress 2012). “Spending a year with the Garmin-Cervélo team was unique because it gave me access to a team that is not only winning on the road with a cast of quirky characters, but that is also, under Jonathan Vaughters’ leadership, trying to change a European cycling establishment that is sometimes reluctant to move beyond its medieval ways.”
From winter training camp on the cobbled lanes of medieval Girona, Spain, to hard-earned stage victories in last summer’s Tour de France, to flesh-shredding crashes at the Vuelta a España in September, Argyle Armada brings the life and work of a pro cycling team into focus through incisive writing and spectacular color photographs. Download a preview chapter of the book at argylearmada.com.
over the clif
Clif Bar celebrates its 20th anniversary in May, which kind of makes us feel old. But we’ll still happily indulge in its commemorative limited edition bar, the Gary’s Panforte, inspired by founder and co-CEO Gary Erickson’s cycling adventure over Italy’s famed Passo di Gàvia, the ride that gave birth to the Clif Bar concept twenty years ago. A blend of almonds, pistachios, hazelnuts, walnuts, pears, currants and spices, we hear it’s crafted from an 800-year-old Italian recipe, which makes us feel young.
24.251 kilometers
The oldest ever track record, set by French cyclist Robert Marchand two months after his 100th birthday at the World Cycling Centre in Aigle, Switzerland, in the time of one hour.
