Living Life Riverside: Our Nightmarish Pursuit of the American Dream

“Living Life Riverside” is a tragicomedy about your vanilla-average Midwestern couple who, when they reached the age of fifty, stopped and asked themselves, “Is that all there is?”, decided their answer was “Hell No!”, and leapt blindly off a cliff in pursuit of the American dream by purchasing a historic, haunted, maintenance-deprived hotel in the 8,000-foot frozen extremes of Middle Park, Colorado.

My wife of more than thirty years and I, (with not one minute of hotel, bar or restaurant experience between us) believed that our purchase of The Historic Riverside Hotel, Bar & Restaurant, located in the 500-resident mountain hamlet of Hot Sulphur Springs, Colorado, would provide us with a career that we would enjoy and an income that would send us comfortably into retirement. Unfortunately, our dream turned into a nightmare due to a variety of circumstances unforeseen and red flags ignored, including the 2008 recession, a local bank owned by a pack of avaricious cowboys, and a previous owner whose only truthful disclosure regarding the property was that it was haunted—the only disclosure that we hadn’t believed at the time. From our purchase to our ultimate failure and foreclosure, “Living Life Riverside” details the highs and lows of the hospitality business and brings to life small-town kooks and characters, persnickety and peculiar hotel and restaurant patrons, stoner chefs, drunken plumbers, a full-time town mortician turned part-time maître d’ and accused felon, and, last but not least, the hotel’s collection of absolutely real pranksterous poltergeists and heart-stopping phantoms.