I ended up enjoying Denver a lot more than I thought I would. I had planned to stay there for a year or two, and ended up staying for three years. I went in with not a lot of expectations other than that it's close to the mountains and that there's lots of outdoor stuff to do.
What was interesting was this dream of always going out to the mountains and traveling around — I didn't actually go to the mountains that often. I ended up just sticking mostly to the city of Denver and getting to know what Denver was like. It's such a job to plan and drive out into the mountains — young people who move to Denver realize they won't be able to do it as often as they wish.
There's traffic, and life gets crazy and busy. Personally, I kind of forced that personality on myself. I'm not really that.
But I do know that a lot of people who are super-adventurous explorers probably make more time than I did to get out to the mountains during the weekend. I grew up in a rural town in central Wisconsin — the closest big city would be Wausau. When COVID hit, I ended up teaching in Wisconsin and loving it.
A friend of mine moved out to Colorado for a nursing job, and I knew that I didn't want to stay in Wisconsin. I ended up moving to Colorado in 2021 and found a teaching job out there, but I also just needed space to recollect myself and figure out what my next steps and goals were. I wanted to be closer to big Caribbean communities I went to college at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, .
