2004-03-25 - 12:51 p.m.
If I update this thing once every week or so, will that be enough?
Perhaps. It’s not like I’ve been inundated with e-mails and guestbook entries wondering where the hell I am. (Am I bitter? Taste me!)
But to answer that question, I was in Denver, visiting my sister-in-law and her husband to be. The plan was to drive out Thursday afternoon as soon as I got off work, and arrive early Friday morning. We planned ahead very carefully: made lists, packed the bags the night before, bought a cooler and some stuff to keep the Professor entertained, and set up a driving schedule so we wouldn’t get too tired.
Yeah, right.
First off, J didn’t pick me up until half an hour after I finished work as she was running late. This put us smack into rush-hour traffic. Things were further complicated by our hosts’ request for Steak & Shake chili. They don’t have Steak & Shake in Denver, and they’d been jonesing for the chili. So, we had to stop and pick up a dozen cans. While we stopped, we decided to repack the van. We didn’t get back on the road until nearly 5 PM. We made good time through St. Charles, then stopped in Wentzville at (you guessed it) Steak & Shake for dinner. That killed another hour. Here it is, 7 PM, and we’ve travelled some 30 miles. Oh boy. Things went pretty smoothly across Missouri, and we rolled into KC by about midnight. We still had to get across Kansas and half of Colorado. All of us, even the Professor, had developed a thousand-yard stare by this time, and I was starting to drool. This was not a good sign. Yet we pressed on.
The last straw came at the toll booth outside of Topeka, when we asked the teller how much farther we had to go.
“580 miles to Denver. You’ve still got a lot of driving ahead.” We decided that we’d earned a night in a real bed, and we stopped in Junction City. Said bed was substantially smaller than what we’re used to, and the Professor did not want to sleep in her portable crib. We slept, but we had to turn in unison. The next morning, fortified by nasty hotel coffee and a Country Kitchen breakfast, we headed west. Eight hours of driving later, punctuated by many stops for stretching, diaper changes, and toddler activities, we rolled into our hosts’ condo lot.
I gotta do some bragging on the Professor. She was really mellow through the whole trip, and even when running through gift shops full of fragile items, she did not break anything or cause too much havoc. She was fascinated by a five-foot tall teddy bear, and spent a lot of time hugging, patting, and otherwise interacting with said bear to the delight of the store teller. Too bad we didn’t get pictures.
The next three days were mostly spent hanging out with Rachel and Aaron, our kind hosts, doing a few touristy things, doing some shopping, and watching satellite TV on their huge plasma screen. I gotta tell ya, Teletubbies gets downright trippy in HDTV. We drove up onto the Continental Divide and played in the snowfields, ate awesome pizza at Beau Jo’s in Idaho Springs, went to the Denver Zoo and got sunburns, and went to a great thrift store. I found a couple of vintage Harris tweed pieces, an overcoat and a blazer, for ridiculously low prices. The blazer was too small for me, but fit Aaron perfectly. He looked very professorial, which is fitting seeing as he has a doctorate in chemistry. Of course, I had to educate the man on the glories of authentic Harris tweed, especially Harris tweed for $3. The overcoat was a good fit, and for $8, I had to buy it. (I’ve since priced the coat on some vintage-clothing websites, and it’s worth about $60. Go me!) Denver in general was very nice; very warm, sunny, beautiful, and well-scrubbed. Denver and its outlying bedroom communities are growing very fast, and it’s very different from south St. Louis. I found myself thinking about moving after a day or so. I managed to cure myself of that after looking through the real estate section. Ouch! Our house in St. Louis would easily go for $250k there! Mortgage hell!
We drove back Tuesday, in a marathon 14-hour session. Next time we may fly, depending on airfares. Yeah, that would be worth saving for. Or by the next time we’ll have forgotten how grueling the trip was. Heh, right.
