What a difference a day makes……We traveled overnight around the mountains, rather than through them, which was still a very rough ride and none of us got a decent nights sleep. But in the morning we woke up in the middle of a park, Chautauqua, nestled in the hills above Boulder: a very pleasant environment to shake off a sleepless night.
I didn’t know anything about the Chautauqua Movement before today, but this park and the buildings located on it is the longest running Chautauqua west of the Mississippi. For those of you as ignorant as I of this movement, it was created (according to Wikipedia) in the late 19th century as a kind of adult education movement. Chautauqua assemblies expanded and spread throughout rural America until the mid-1920s. The Chautauqua brought entertainment and culture for the whole community, with speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers and specialists of the day. At the height of the movement there were several hundred of these permanent facilities spread throughout the country: quite a brilliant and noble idea.