Colorado Reality Check

So recently, I went to Colorado, and this time, I had a lot more interactions with different people, and it was such a reality check. When you're out here on the East Coast, everyone is rude and uptight and won’t trust someone enough to lend a quick hand. I’m speaking from firsthand experience because I’m not saying I’m the rudest or meanest person—I try to be polite and joyful—but it’s hard to trust strangers here because most people seem to have an agenda that isn’t in your best interest in certain situations, so I refrain from putting myself in those situations.

From my experience on this recent trip, since I had more interactions with more people, everyone was the complete opposite, and it was truly a culture shock to me because I had never experienced that from so many people. When I go to the Dominican Republic, it’s kind of like that, but the motive behind the friendliness is often to get money from you in some way. That’s why I said people sometimes have hidden agendas. But with the people in Colorado, their energy and attitude are so genuine. They're just genuinely nice—they don’t have an agenda; that’s how they’re wired to be.

For example, in the photo that I have as the cover for this blog post, we picked up about 5-8 snowboarders and took them up the mountain so they could go back down again. We weren’t the only ones doing it either, and it just seems like a regular thing people do for each other out there on the mountain. You would never see that in Camden.