Apparently My Travel Bucket List Is a Little Weird

I was recently brainstorming places I want to go and things I want to see when I came to a somewhat unsettling realization.

I may be significantly weirder than I thought.

Now, to be fair, nobody has ever mistaken me for normal. I am a high school theatre teacher. Weird is practically a job qualification. You have to be at least a little peculiar to maintain the attention of 80 teenagers whose personalities range from “do not notice me, I’m not even here” to “I have climbed onto the rolling scaffolding shouting Monty Python quotes and there is absolutely no reason for it.”

If professional cat herding were an actual career, I would have tenure. So yes. I knew I was weird.

What I did not realize was that my travel bucket list apparently looks less like something you’d find in Condé Nast Traveler and more like a list assembled by someone who found a mysterious handwritten map in the back of an abandoned curiosity shop.

There are beautiful beaches on it. There are castles. There are ancient ruins.

But then there are the other places…the places that make me sit forward and say: Wait. They do WHAT there?

And that’s when I realized I may have a problem.

Or possibly a blog series.

Exhibit A: Frozen Dead Guy Days

Frozen Dead Guy Days

Let’s begin with the event that started me down this particular frozen rabbit hole.

Frozen Dead Guy Days.

If that name doesn’t immediately make you want to know more, I’m not entirely certain we can travel together.

I discovered this festival while doing something completely unrelated to travel. I was teaching improvisation to my high school students and putting together a list of bizarre real-world events they could use as prompts.

This is one of the hazards of being a theatre teacher. You begin the morning looking for improv ideas and end it wondering how expensive flights to Colorado are.

Somewhere in my research, I found Frozen Dead Guy Days.

I clicked.

This was my first mistake.

Within minutes I had gone from “Ha! That’s funny” to “TIM. WE NEED TO GO TO COLORADO.”

Because there is, in fact, a frozen dead guy. His name is Grandpa Bredo. And buckle up, because Grandpa has traveled more since his death than some people do while alive.

Meet Grandpa Bredo

Bredo Morstoel lived in Norway, where he painted, fished, skied, hiked and spent more than 30 years as the director of parks and recreation for Baerum County.

Then he died in 1989.

Under normal circumstances, this would be where someone’s biography becomes considerably less eventful. Not Grandpa Bredo’s.

After his death, Bredo was packed in dry ice and shipped internationally, which is a sentence I did not expect to type today.

He traveled from Norway to a cryonics facility in Oakland, California, where he spent nearly four years in liquid nitrogen. In 1993, he was moved to Colorado to join his daughter, Aud, and grandson, Trygve, who were interested in establishing their own cryonics facility.

Eventually Grandpa Bredo ended up frozen in a shed in the hills above Nederland.

As one does, of course.

This is the precise moment when the story crosses from unusual family arrangement into Kim has stopped everything else she was supposed to be doing and is now fully invested.

Then There Were Some Pesky Visa Problems

Grandson Trygve was eventually deported after his visa expired. Bredo’s daughter Aud remained behind, responsible for the household and, presumably, the unusual parental responsibility of making sure Dad remained sufficiently frozen.

Then Aud faced eviction because the house didn’t have electricity or plumbing. Which created a rather unusual logistical problem: What exactly happens to Grandpa?

You can’t just unplug the freezer.

Aud contacted a local reporter because she was worried her father might thaw. The reporter contacted the Nederland city council, and the whole situation eventually led the town to pass a municipal law concerning the keeping of frozen human and animal remains.

Please imagine that city council meeting. I have sat through many meetings in my life. Not once has anyone had to raise their hand and say, “Before we move on to parking permits, we really need to settle the frozen grandpa situation.”

The law prohibited keeping frozen remains at home. There was, however, a problem.

Grandpa Bredo was already there. So he was grandfathered in.

GRANDFATHERED.

IN.

I don’t know whether the universe occasionally writes its own jokes, but I would like to shake its hand.

Thus Grandpa Bredo remained frozen in Nederland for decades, cared for by his family and community while becoming something of a local celebrity.

Naturally, someone eventually decided this required a festival. These are my people.

And Then Colorado Made It a Party

Frozen Dead Guy Days grew into an annual celebration of Grandpa Bredo and all things delightfully strange.

There are costumes.

There is music.

There are cold-weather competitions.

And there are coffin races.

COFFIN.

RACES.

Teams race decorated coffins while carrying a costumed teammate.

Some people travel for Michelin-starred restaurants. Some people travel to lie peacefully on beaches and read novels. Apparently I want to stand in Colorado yelling encouragement at strangers sprinting through the snow carrying a fake corpse.

I am learning things about myself.

Grandpa Got an Upgrade

In 2023, after decades in his shed, Grandpa Bredo moved up in the world.

With his grandson’s permission, a team from Alcor transferred him to the old ice house at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, where he was placed head-first into liquid nitrogen. Today, he’s the centerpiece of the hotel’s cryonics museum, which the Stanley describes as the world’s only museum devoted to cryonics.

Yes. That Stanley Hotel. The hotel famous for inspiring Stephen King’s The Shining.

So let me make certain I understand this correctly.

There is a historic hotel associated with one of the most famous horror novels ever written. It offers ghost tours. It houses a cryonics museum. And there is an actual frozen Norwegian grandfather on the premises. The Stanley even offers a Frozen Dead Guy Tour.

Colorado, you magnificent lunatic. You had me at frozen dead guy.

Unfortunately, I Have a Job

There is only one problem. Frozen Dead Guy Days happens at almost exactly the worst possible time of year for a high school theatre teacher.

Spring.

More specifically, right around the gravitational black hole known as Spring Musical Tech Week. Tech Week is when theatre teachers stop being ordinary mammals and begin surviving entirely on caffeine, gaff tape, misplaced optimism and the belief that eventually someone will remember where they put the cordless drill.

Leaving town during Tech Week would be irresponsible. Potentially catastrophic. Possibly grounds for my students to hunt me down and drag me back to the auditorium themselves.

So Frozen Dead Guy Days will probably have to wait until I retire.

Someday.

Someday I will wake up in Colorado, put on entirely too many layers of clothing and go watch people race coffins in honor of a Norwegian man who has been dead since 1989 but remains considerably more socially active than I am.

And I will be ridiculously happy. Because apparently this is my kind of travel. Not just beautiful. Not just historic. Not just somewhere with excellent food and a nice view.

I want the places with stories that make absolutely no sense until someone explains them. I want strange museums, peculiar festivals, bizarre traditions, questionable historical decisions and local attractions that require the sentence: “Okay, you’re going to think I’m making this up, but…”

So perhaps my bucket list isn’t weird. Perhaps it is simply very specifically curated. At least that’s what I’m going to tell myself.

And Frozen Dead Guy Days? You’re on the list.

Eventually, Grandpa. Eventually.