Jealousy is sure to arise over spring break for you broke college students.
Unless, of course, you take the following steps.
Face it: your parents aren’t rich enough to fund an expensive spring break trip to Lake Havasu, Fort Meyers or the Texas Gulf Coast, where all your out-of-state-tuition, no-financial aid-needed friends are heading.
Yeah, you’ve got a job when you’re not in class to pay the rent and for beer money, and hey, the fact you work at all might even set you apart from your peers leaving Boulder for warm weather and drunken revelry. But your earnings are just enough to get by and hit that Chicken on the Hill place for a meal every now and then.
Wear the poor college student label as a badge of honor. It’s a lifestyle your privileged friends will one day feel stupid for missing out on, regretful about asking their parents for money every four days.
Plus, you can probably have more fun sticking around Colorado. First, there is a way lesser chance you catch a venereal disease than the coeds who were strangers an hour before consuming multiple car bombs together on a lake houseboat.
Second, all those Californians and mid-westerners end up coming here to visit, and, in the opinion of many in Colorado, too many are so bold as to even try moving here, so you’re already in a dream destination of sorts.
Step one to have a successful spring break without a plane ticket: turn off your social media feeds. Looking at the photos of all your friends having the time of their lives before waking up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning will make you incredibly envious.
Step two: just be thankful you’re not completing an essay assignment from midnight to 3 a.m. on four cups of coffee and trying to sound coherent about the literary relevance of some novel that’s almost 100 years old by a writer who died broker than you are and drunker than your friends on spring break.
Step three: hit some of these good old-fashioned Colorado locales.
Bum around Boulder
If you’re feeling a little anti-social, and need a recharge or a break from all those party-hardy friends of yours while they’re away, catch up on your pleasure reading. Or do a little writing for yourself, maybe even a poem, or organize your calendar and get prepared to rock the last few weeks of the semester.
Boulder has some great coffee shops meant to host these kinds of endeavors. And if you’re feeling like checking out somewhere new, away from campus, the Hill or downtown, head north up Broadway to Logan’s Espresso. There’s also Amante Coffee a little further up there.
If you’d like a drink of something stronger, the Rosetta Hall restaurant and bar court is still somewhat newly opened downtown. It’s a got a fancy-ish vibe to it, and is open late.
Downtown Denver
An actual city, where there are lower proportions of college students and more actual adults, might suit you. Plus, it doesn’t quite slow down the way a true college town does when the students take off. There should still be some good crowds and plenty of new people to meet if you head downtown one evening; there are plenty of late-night establishments to stumble into in the Lower Downtown area, better known as LoDo.
The same holds true with the RiNo (River North Art District), north of Coors Field. There’s plenty of craft breweries, cideries, pubs and clubs to keep you going, and enough street art to keep you gawking for days. Mostly based in a previously industrial part of town, the district offers food, booze and music venues sure to satisfy any taste. (Unless your tastes run parallel to Bud Light. If that’s the case, this may not be the place for you.)
If you want to do something during the day, check out the well-known 16th Street Mall, or there is the Dairy Block, which is kind of like a food hall similar to Rosetta Hall, but a little bigger and easier to get lost in.
Elsewhere in Colorado
Check out the mountains. If you can make the drive or hop on the Bustang and have a place to stay a night, perhaps with a buddy coming in for his or her own spring break ski trip, a night out in Vail never fails. The George, an establishment in the basement of a hotel, is usually hopping in the evenings.
Want to do something closer to home? Go hit Lyons, just a short drive up U.S. 36. It’s a small town with a great mountain vibe, and plenty of places, including Oskar Blues, 303 Main St., to grab a cold one.
