To the east in the richest city in USA: Aspen/Colorado

28.05. / Saturday / Palisades-Aspen

We have breakfast outside in the sun, how nice! Therefore, we only leave at 10:30 am and continue rolling on Highway 70 to the east. At Glenwood Springs, we turn off onto the road towards Aspen and first go shopping here and stock up on lunch and breakfast, as the hotel confirmation states that there is no breakfast. This is now quite unusual as we always get at least a continental breakfast in almost every hotel. This was completely different a few years ago.

We fuel up again and then drive south on Highway 82 into the Rockies. We reach Aspen at 2:00 pm and are back in Colorado for a while. Our hotel is located right on the main road. Aspen has 5,000 inhabitants, so it is manageable and the traffic is rather low. It is quite quiet here, although we have Memorial Day Weekend and the Americans all have a day off on Monday. We expected a huge rush, but due to the long, cold, and snowy winter, the winter season is hardly over and summer has not yet begun.

Rooms are available everywhere. We booked our hotel, the Annabelle Inn, from Germany. The room itself is nice, but it is located in a corridor, so we can only see the corridor and half of the courtyard from the window. Above the beds are small windows at a height of about 2.50m, through which you cannot see outside, but which are suitable for ventilation.

Annabelle Inn/Aspen

Aspen is one of the richest cities in the world and allegedly the richest city in the USA. For an average house, you have to reckon with at least 1.5 million dollars here. Aspen is of course known as a winter sports resort.

On the way to the Visitor Center (which is then closed), a SUV stops us with a woman who asks us where we want to go. We are initially quite reserved, but she is so nice and immediately tells us where everything is in the city and marks a good steakhouse and the house of Jack Nicholson on our city map. She was a neighbor of Jack Nicholson for 11 years. Finally, she takes us a few blocks by car and drops us off in the center. Really nice.

We walk around the town in a zigzag. Everything that has a rank and name in designers is here: Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Dior. However, it doesn't feel posh or flashy here, rather cozy. However, the shop window displays are quite special...

The town is not crowded, many shops have shortened opening hours. We really thought it would be bustling here, but it's not.

As we settle down for a refreshment at Independance Square (in the sun), we start talking to two Americans who tell us that the mountain pass over Independance Pass has only been open for two days because there was a lot (6 meters) of snow here in winter, which has now been cleared. Both say we absolutely have to drive there. OK, we would love to do that because it is on the way to Denver, where we want to continue tomorrow.

Barefoot snowboarder in Aspen

The gondola to the local mountain, Aspen Mountain (3,400 m), is operating from 9:30 am to 2:00 pm again this (Memorial Day Weekend) weekend, and we plan to do that tomorrow morning. I would have liked to visit the Maroon Bells, two brown hills by a lake, but we are told that the road there has not been cleared yet. The weather is sunny, the air is wonderful, even though we are at an altitude of 2,500 m, we walk around in a t-shirt.

For dinner, we sit on the balcony of the restaurant "Jimmy's". An elderly couple who lives nearby joins us. Both are extremely enthusiastic about Aspen and the cultural offerings, the tranquility, and the atmosphere of the city. Their daughter is the head pastry chef of the old Hotel Jerome. Since Kevin Costner, who has a ranch just 1.5 miles outside the city, ordered his wedding cake at the same hotel, this daughter made the wedding cake. Well, if that's not something!? The two tell us about other celebrities who have houses here, but live in a gated community on the opposite slope. People appreciate here that they are not bothered, Harrison Ford also has a house here, as well as Cher and Charlie Sheen.

We chat for quite a while with the couple and behind us, there is a thunderstorm and rain, and a double rainbow appears over a hill.

We thought the mountains would be lined with burnt tree skeletons, but they are all aspen trees that do not yet have their new leaves. It is the end of May, the winter was long, and spring is slowly beginning here. When we see green leaves, they are mostly on birch trees and often only as a shimmer. We find it remarkable that mountains over 2,500 meters high are covered with deciduous trees and not fir trees.