Staying with Linde and Joe was a blast - they were great hosts and showed me a fun time in Colorado. One thing that I really enjoyed was exploring the downtown and visiting some of their favorite places. The weekend that I was in Fort Collins there was a music festival going on so on Saturday we rode bikes in along a river to experience some good food and music.
The downtown was packed with people, vendors, bikes, dogs and stages with performing musicians. One of the things I noticed was the waste disposal system. Every garbage can had three options: compost, recycle and trash and at each can there was a volunteer available to help you if you were unsure of the correct decision. Another vendor that I was excited about was Dole Whip - a non-dairy soft serve fruit ice cream. Linde and I both had cones and they were delicious!
My most favorite stop was the brewery tour at the New Belgian Brewing Company. This is the company that makes the beer called Fat Tire which is pretty well known around the Midwest. The brewery tour was a lot of fun - the guides were young and enthusiastic, we received a lot of free and unique beers to try and the tour itself was very entertaining and thorough. The coolest thing about the tour was hearing about the unique environmentally friendly/outdoorsy culture that the company has created and now promotes.
Employees are encouraged to take care of the environment in a number of ways, the main one being biking to work. After your first year of work as an employee, New Belgian gives you a brand new special, one-of-a-kind bike so that you can become a part of the biking club too. Working for the company seems like it would be a lot of fun. The building has slides, games, couches and a climbing wall among other entertainment. Every Friday each worker goes home with a 12 pack of the beer of their choice. Needless to say, competition for New Belgian jobs is fierce and it's almost impossible to get a position.
Micro-brewed beers and bikes seem to be the hottest topics in Fort Collins at the moment and almost nobody drinks 'boring' beers like Bud or Miller - who would when there are several fabulous micro-breweries in the downtown area alone?! Nobody has a 'boring' bike there either and the fad that I noticed was something called a 'fixed gear' bike. This means that the pedals are directly connected to the wheel so they always have to be moving and you can't coast. Again, just spending a few days in Colorado was enough for me to be impressed and entertained by another cool mini-culture of the best country in the world.
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