Telluride - Food, Views and a Tesla Coil

Managed to miss the rock slides on I-70 last weekend and headed southwest to Telluride for the Culinary Arts Festival. Mark runs the video for these shows. I got to push buttons.

We stayed in town this year at a cute little B&B/ski lodge, the Manitou Lodge. The weather was perfect and the setting gorgeous. The festival was about 1,000 feet up from town in Mountain Village. So to get back and forth we had to take the gonjula (gondola). A gorgeous view but sweaty palms for me.

Telluride reminds me of Roslyn, Washington -- another old mining town. Stone buildings, tin ceilings. Property cost is a little different though. A cute little condo next to the B&B was cheap at $2.5mil. Sigh.

Telluride is a doggy town. There are dogs everywhere. You can find "puppy parking" places along the main drag and lots of water bowls.

That same weekend is the Telluride Tech Festival. The Tech Fest is based on the historical fact that in 1891, Nikola Tesla, George Westinghouse and Telluride's own L.L. Nunn built the world's first commercial grade AC power plant in Telluride. In honor of that, the tech fest has its own Tesla Coil - hard to capture on camera but I tried. This year, Dr. Mega Volt was present -- an interesting guy who created a mesh wire suit that allowed him to play with the bolts of energy generated by the tesla coil. Something you really got to see.

Hey that reminds me of an Northern Exposure episode (and what part of life does not remind me an epsiode of Northern Exposure). Chris, the DJ, decides to get inside electricity by building a bathtub device with a giant magnet. Dr. Mega Volt and Chris-in-the-Morning are on the same wavelength -- so to speak.

I'm wondering how common the name Nunn is... that's my birth last name. I wonder if there's any relation.