Next Stop: Denver
Before there was TikTok, there was TripTik.
Whoever said life is about the journey, not the destination, never drove a rental truck with no rearview mirror across flatland Middle America, on a beeline for Colorado. The trip was 100% about the destination.
After ten years of running a restaurant in a small college town in central New York, I’d grown tired of the up-and-down business cycles. Ithaca’s economy was tied to Cornell and Ithaca College’s school calendar. When the students left town, they took their parents’ credit cards with them. I could overlook a quiet wintry Tuesday when snowplows outnumbered cars on the roads, but when Ithaca turned into a ghost town during every single winter and summer break, I was at the end of my rope.
My wife Emily and I yearned for a fresh start. We put together a wish list and visited cities across the country in search of a new home.
One place quickly stood out: Denver.
When we stepped off the plane and saw the Rocky Mountains and glaring sun, we were smitten. Strolling down the 16th Street Mall, a mile-long stretch of restaurants and bars, we felt the happy hour energy spilling onto the sidewalks. A few blocks away, my favorite musical, Broadway’s touring “Phantom of the Opera,” was in town. Walking around Denver’s Wash Park, strangers smiled and nodded as if they knew us.
The clincher: the city’s historic neighborhoods featured houses we could actually afford.
By the summer of 1997, we were ready to take the plunge. On July 31, Emily and I huddled in Ithaca’s AAA office and purchased a TripTik, a spiral-bound strip booklet of maps showing our 1600-mile route to Denver, mile-by-mile highlighted in orange marker, passing through Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Chicago, Des Moines, Omaha, and finally, Denver.
The next day, we jammed our belongings into a seventeen-foot rental truck, said our goodbyes, and headed west.
That’s the sanitized version of our embarkation to Colorado.
Leaving was easy; saying goodbye was hard.
Having spent most of my life in central New York, I was excited to move to a bigger city, but also intimidated. Life was comfortable; there wasn’t much traffic, everyone knew everybody, and everywhere you needed to go was less than ten minutes away. We had Cayuga Lake, the famous gorges, and the Saturday farmers market, where I once sold cookies out of the back of my Chevette.
It was a small town, but it was my small town.
Until it wasn’t.
By the time I turned 37, it seemed like almost everyone around me had left. My sister Lisa left her entry-level job at the university and moved to Colorado, sight unseen. A week later, she landed a higher-paying job in an executive suite. My childhood friend, Joe Snyder, departed for CU Boulder and rarely came back. Years later, when he visited during the holidays, he’d corner me in my restaurant and give me a hundred reasons why I should move to Denver—the downtown, Coors Field, the skiing and hiking, and a trendy neighborhood called Lodo.
Even my father bolted west for Las Vegas as soon as he retired.
I had a nice run with Jay’s Clinton Hall Cafe; the townies supported me as best they could during slow times. My restaurant and cookbooks were regularly featured in the Ithaca Journal and weekly papers—the “local-boy-makes-good’ stories. But there was a gnawing feeling that it was time to leave.
After we loaded our rental truck with moving boxes, computer desks, and bedframes, we made our last trip to Myers Heights to say our goodbyes.
As we pulled up, my 85 year old grandmother was outside sitting under the carport.
“Well, this is it,” I said, getting out of the rental truck.
“So you’re really leaving?” she asked.
“I guess so.”
“You’ll be coming back, right?” she asked.
“Of course, I’ll be back soon to visit,” I said.
“Why do you have to leave?” She asked, still in disbelief that her last grandchild was leaving. This wasn’t the first time she brought this up. It was a sore subject.
“I think I’ll have a better chance in a bigger city, opening a restaurant and such. There are more people, more stuff to do. Lisa’s there; she likes it,” I said, my voice trailing off.
“Okay then. Bless yourself. Drive safe.” With that, we hugged, and I could smell the kitchen where I spent so many Sundays, eating stuffed grape leaves out of a pot on the stovetop.
And off we went.
The cross-country drive stretched over four days. By the time we reached Denver, our TripTik — dog-eared, coffee-stained, consulted like a sacred treasure map, guiding us through eight states and a dozen rest stops—dropped us into the middle of rush hour and tapped out. Our final destination, an apartment complex called the Breakers, was nowhere to be found on the map. Just a big fat orange blob circling the “Civic Center.”
I did what any normal adult from a small town would do. Stopped at a traffic light, inching through gridlock, I rolled down the window and yelled to the driver next to us.
“Hey, how do we get to the Breakers?”
“Where?”
“The Breakers. On Mississippi Ave.”
“No idea!” And off they’d go. Then I’d try again at the next light.
“How do we get to Mississippi Ave?”
“East or West?”
I turned to Emily. “Is there an East or West Mississippi?”
She checked the map. “East!”
Too late. Off they went.
Eventually, we found a mini mart and pulled over for gas. In that era, mini marts were informal visitor centers. You could always find someone who looked like Ranger Rick behind the counter, offering to give you good directions.
Or so I thought.
“Go south on Colorado, east on Alameda, and southeast on Leetsdale.”
I frantically scribbled it down on a piece of scrap paper.
“Uhm, is that a right or left on Colorado?”
“Right, I guess. It’s south on Colorado.” Ranger Rick looked at me like I was an idiot.
After we left, I turned to Emily. “Sorry, I didn’t bring my fucking compass.”
“Calm down, Jay. I heard people use the mountains as a guide. They’re always pointing west.”
“I’m going to burn that TripTik!”
Almost 100 hours after we left our past behind, we landed in our new home.
Jay Solomon is the owner and chef behind JAYS2GO, a Denver-based gourmet dinner delivery service. When he’s not in the kitchen, he writes about food, family, sports, growing up, and the highs and lows of restaurant life. His business website is www.jays2go.com.
We’re all so glad you and Emily chose Denver!
OMG! - Flashback to David asking me to measure the "west wall, north to south" and telling me west was where the mountains were. I was inside a room with NO FREAKING WINDOWS!!! :)