Colorado - Utah

Warning: This may be a long post.

One interesting thing about blogging I've found so far is my tendency to put my foot in my mouth. I have no idea who all might be reading this, so I've had to watch myself at times to make sure I don't make fun of anyone or reveal private things. If I have done this at all so far...sorry!...moving on...

Here's a quick run down of what I did in Colorado. We got there Friday night after a ten hour drive or so. Once again, I pooed a little when I saw the mountains. Unlike last summer I had a place to stay. We bunked in Lafayette, just outside of Boulder, with some friends of Fred's he met in grad school at Indiana. Their house was very cool as were their dogs, Layla and Sully. As soon as we got there, we went to a brewpub called Southern Sun. Southern Sun and Mountain Sun are pretty much the same place, an awesome microbrewery with amazing selection and a ton of veggie friendly food. Mountain Sun is in downtown Boulder while Southern Sun is on the outskirts in a strip mall, but with really nice atmosphere. It easily blew away Copper Creek. Easily...in fact I'm kinda pissed about it.

The next morning we woke up to a pancake breakfast and the hilarity of little dogs fighting (playfully of course...no Vick stuff here). I saw on the Great Divide Brewery website that they were having a 14th anniversary party that afternoon before the Rockies game, but before we headed over there, we got a little driving tour of Boulder and the campus of U of Colorado. By afternoon we were ready for a little more beer although I'm not sure if our stomachs were. Great Divide was just charging $10 for all you could drink...wow! It was there where we ran into crazy Atlanta guy who talked all about how moving to Denver was the greatest decision of his life (refer to previous post).

From Great Divide, we walked a few blocks to Coors Field. This was my second time to a Rockies game and just as amazing. I love the feel of the stadium, the mountains in the distance, the city right next door, the weather!!! The Rockies poured it on in the first inning led by a grand slam by Brad Hawpe. It was nice to see them win. My only regret is missing the bobblehead giveaway. Rockies fans take this bobblehead stuff seriously apparently. There was a massive line at the stadium a good two hours before the game. By the time we got there, we were not among the lucky 10,000 who received a Troy Tulowitzki bobblehead souvenir. Bastards.

The good times kept on rolling Sunday. First, Fred and I drove over to Boulder to do some hiking in the Flat Irons. We went all the way up to the top on the Royal Arch trail. A great view waited for us up there along with some fun rocks to free climb. When we got home, we accompanied our hosts to Left Hand Brewery in Longmont, CO, just north of Boulder. Left Hand was perhaps my favorite brewery so far. It didn't hurt that the weather was amazing. I had a big sampler tray of beers and a couple more. From there, we went just down the block to a party with some CU professors. Our hosts, Pete and Keri, met Fred at Indiana's School of Music a couple years ago. Since then, Pete has become a Professor of Music Education at CU. The party was made up of some of the other music professors. It was a great party with good food, a crazy dog, a fun three year old kid, and a playground. Oddly enough, one of the professor's wives knew Fred from high school so they got to reconnect. Me, I got some good use from the playground.

Monday was our Rocky Mountain day. We headed up in the afternoon and stopped for lunch in Lyons, CO at the Oscar Blues Grill and Brewery, home of Dale's Pale Ale (in a can). From there we crapped our pants a few times on Trail Ridge Road and snapped hundreds of pictures. Compared to last summer when I was there, this time was marked by the massive amount of snow. Apparently, there was a big snow shower up there just a few days before we went. The trail I hiked last summer was unhikeable and the picture of me at the Continental Divide this time around is marked by five feet of snow or so. I won't go on and on about the park experience. We got to see some wildlife, feel some wind, and drive by walls of snow. Love it. At night, we met back up with Pete and Keri for dinner in downtown Boulder and went back to their place to sample some more Colorado brews and play Sequence or "Sequenza" as Pete liked to call it.

Tuesday we had to leave, but we picked up Dave Miles on the way. Dave, a close friend of Fred's, had been visiting one of his friends in Denver and was scheduled to hop on in the car on the ride to Utah. He'll be with us all the way to Austin, Texas. On the way out of town we made a couple of pit stops. One was at a strip mall at the world famous Casa Bonita. Okay, it's really not world famous, but if you're familiar with the South Park episode, you may know what I'm talking about. After Casa Bonita, we headed on to Red Rocks Amphitheater, and then on through the Rockies to Utah.

The drive out to Utah was nice. I even had a flashback to last summer when I ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere Colorado. After we had passed through Grand Junction, I thought to myself, "Oh I'll just wait and get gas a few miles in to Utah"...NOT SO! For miles, I stared at the orange light yelling at me to get gas until we finally stumbled upon some gas. It was a very tense moment. I'm pretty sure if Dave had leaned forward to the front seats of the car where Fred and I were sitting, he would have bumped his head on a tension force field. (Cutting the tension with a knife is just too common a saying. I had to make up another.) Anyway, the problem was solved and we headed on to Arches National Park without having to walk miles in the scorching hot desert.

We got to Arches with about 2 hours of sun, so we decided to go ahead and get some sunset pics. The road made us stupid so we didn't have the foresight to think we needed to get a campground while it was light. We got out of the park with a little bit of sun still out and spotted the Moab Brewery. Again, why we went in and got food/beer and didn't find a campsite...I guess breweries have that effect on me. We got out of there around 10:30 or 11pm. Hmmm, where to sleep for the night? Originally, I had hoped to find a campsite off the Colorado River. I heard these were pretty sweet and really cheap. This was not going to happen as planned. We drove up and down the road and saw nothing. Eventually, I spotted a KOA, but Fred didn't seem too thrilled with setting up a tent in the dark. We drove back into town and asked a few cheap motels about their rates. We even stopped in motel parking lots stealing their wireless signal so that Fred could call for rates of other hotels. $70 was the cheapest thing in Moab and we're talking shitholes like the Bates Motel in Psycho. Even if we had stayed there (I believe it was called the Silver Sage), I would have slept in a sleeping bag on top of the sheets and feared for my life of roaches crawling in my mouth. You get the idea.

It turned out my first instinct was good. We went to the KOA, grabbed a site, turned on the headlights and set up my tent. It was not rustic camping, but I enjoyed it all the same. The wind whipped all night and at one point blew the rain tarp off. Sweet! Three adult males in a three person tent. If you know anything about "3 person tents" you know they really only hold two people comfortably. It was a cozy night to say the least. Fred and I were used to this after sharing hotel beds for years and years of family trips to Shreveport, but poor Dave. We woke up in the morning and headed back to Arches for sunrise pics. That place is just sick. It's like a giant sculpture garden. They say wind and erosion made the rocks into these shapes. I have a sneaking suspicion that God did it. Either that or aliens. Goulay!

That's all for now. To come...Vegas Baby!