Foodie Adventures: Who says being a foodie means sitting at a table?

When I say “foodie adventures,” I’m not talking about eating Rocky Mountain oysters or chocolate-dipped scorpions—though you could do that, too!—I’m talking about getting out of your seat, out of the restaurant and burning off a few calories while you sample some of the best food the area has to offer.

Perhaps the most common foodie adventure is a walking tour. Park once and eat all afternoon as you make your way from restaurant to restaurant sampling some of the finest meals Boulder has to offer. Culinary Connectors (culinaryconnectors.com) offers two different walking and dining tours, which offers guests the chance to dine and chat with some of Boulder’s top chefs. They even offer a self-guided tour if you’re anti-social, and they recently launched a craft beer tour and a food truck tour (both in Denver). Local Table Tours (localtabletours.com) offers a classic Boulder dining tour as well, but why not branch out and do a cocktail tour, a coffee and pastry tour, or a farmer’s market tour with them? Oh, heck, why not sign up for all of them?

If pedaling is more your speed, Boulder Area Bicycling (boulderareabicycleadventures.com) offers a popular urban Brews Cruise, hopping from brewery to brewery by bike, including Twisted Pine, Redstone Meadery and Boulder Beer. The company is ramping up to offer a coffee/tea/chocolate tour of Boulder as well.

Of course, the group that pedals together stays together, and My Handle Bar (myhandlebar.com) has got your group covered with its 16-passenger pub-crawl on wheels. Book the bike for a private shindig with 15 of your closest pals or hop on solo (or with a bud) the first or third Wednesday of each month for their Mixer tours. If you grab a pedaling seat, beware: it’s a workout! But the cocktail stops make up for any calories you might be burning.

Biking and Colorado go together like bacon and, well, anything, so it’s no surprise that several big events combine the two as well. Of course, you probably already know about New Belgium’s Tour de Fat, which will took place in Denver in early September. But maybe you haven’t heard of the Tour de Coops? Transition Colorado again sponsored two bike tours during Eat Local Week in August, including a countywide tour of backyard chicken coops, urban farms, and community gardens and a separate tour of rural and urban farms across Boulder County. Sign up for their e-newsletter at transitioncolorado.org to get all the details as they’re finalized for 2013.

Looking for something even more out of the box? Social deals site LivingSocial offers “adventures,” which are often a physical activity paired with a meal. These change all the time, but recently they offered a zipline tour with beer and snacks in Conifer, and a “Shootin’ + Drinkin’” package in Englewood. OK, maybe that second one isn’t such a good idea…. It was actually a shooting lesson at a gun range followed by dinner at a barbecue restaurant and whisky bar. Hey, at least it wasn’t the other way around.