"I've been working in food and beverage since I was ten years old," Roland says. He began as a dishwasher at a restaurant called Bird and Brew, which was owned by a close family friend in Lacey, Washington, a suburb of Olympia.
He ultimately ended up in the Grand Canyon area, where a cousin of his lived. While working in restaurants around there, he met some people who shared a love for his favorite band, Widespread Panic."We would travel from the Grand Canyon to see Panic everywhere, and in our travels to Red Rocks, the first year that they played there, we came back through Crested Butte," he says."It looked like a Grateful Dead parking lot, and I felt at home instantly.
There he contacted an old friend from Massachusetts, and the two set out to open their own eatery. But Roland also split with his wife, who moved to Denver with their daughter."My kid is everything to me. She's like my world. ... We were two weeks into the opening of the restaurant, and I was like, 'I gotta go,'" he says.
In 2021, with Thompson looking to sell to someone else, Roland made his own offer to buy the truck."I ended up trading him my minivan, pulling everything I had in the bank and selling my mountain bike. I pulled everything I had together. My offer was clearly less than the other offer, but he went for it," he says.