Leaving St. Louis wasn’t easy. Well…in more aspects than one. We left our friends and families for a strange new place, not to mention the difficulty of packing up our 3,200sq ft house into a box 8’x 8’x 12’. But we did it…we got everything packed up and on the evening of the 17th, we headed west.
I think my car rode about 5” from the ground
After a 12 hour total drive from St. Louis to Boulder, CO, Ben, Brian and I arrived on Friday the 18th enlisting the help of my brother. It was a long and pretty boring drive (at least in Kansas).
We finally made it around 4pm to our new place in Longmont, CO where we are staying for the summer, while working in Boulder. Immediately when we stepped out of the car, we realized just how special of a place this part of the country is. The sun was shining bright (as it does 300 days out of the year), the air was so crisp and clean, and the mountains were towering above the trees to the west.
Our new place!
We loaded in all of our house stuff into the new place and quickly jaunted over to the TechStars HQ (at a secret undisclosed location somewhere in Boulder) to load in all our office equipment. We met some of the guys from the other teams, which was really cool but couldn’t stay long because we had an incredible amount of stuff to unpack and a concert to still make in Denver (which subsequently, we didn’t get to in time, unfortunately).
Saturday, we decided to live like the people in Colorado do and drive south to go white water rafting. We headed to the Arkansas River area and specifically Buena Vista, CO to Arkansas Valley Adventures.
Seriously beautiful views around here…
(Yes, that is a frozen lake)
We were all pretty pumped for the ride. When reserving our trip, the person on the phone asked us if we were physically fit and my brother said with a boastful laugh “yes”. Well, needless to say, once we saw our guide, Mark, we pretty much all crawled into our little turtle shells. When he proceeded to tell us that the river was moving much faster than usual (2,000 cu ft/s), that we were going to be riding level 5 rapids and that the water was just a few degrees above freezing, I know at least I got a little hesitant. But after the whole thing was over, it was easily one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Mark told us we did awesome, and that was a pretty good validation for us.
Left to right: Matt Galligan (me), Brian DeWitt, Bill (another guy that rode along with us), Ben Brightwell, Mark S (our guide) and Ryan Galligan (my brother)
The trip home was a little tiring (I think we were all pretty beat) and I know I caught some good zzz’s on the way back for sure.
The rest of the weekend we spent moving into the place all the way and exploring the area to see what Boulder had to offer…
Yesterday (Monday) was the start of our work while at TechStars, and I’ll save that for another blog post but I think it goes without saying that so far, the experience has been nothing short of mind-blowing.
Expect a post later this week…
Later kids,
Matt
[tags]socialthing inc, TechStars, Matt Galligan, Brian DeWitt, Ben Brightwell, Ryan Galligan, Colorado, Boulder, white water rafting, fun, moving[/tags]
