My Colorado Trip
All of these stories are better in person, but here's an overview of our wonderful trip to Colorado a couple of weeks ago, presented in convenient timeline format.
THURS - Drove to my sister Jo's apartment at about 2:30 am after staying up all night. Parked the car, hopped in our friend Jessie's, and she dropped us off at the airport around 4:00. Went through security, which did NOT take two hours, and slept at the gate until it was time to board. At this point, I should say that I ADORE plane flights. They're one of the best things in the world, seriously. Watching the clouds go by and the city reduced to squares and circles and lines - it's amazing. I have yet to go a takeoff without gazing meaningfully through the window and listening to Orbital's "Halcyon + On + On". (Name that reference and I'm proud of you.) Well - except THIS flight. You see, they no longer just put you next to the window in a flight, even if you're in the cheap seats and put the little preference on your ticket - they charge you extra for it when you check in. And I didn't. And the girl who apparently DID climbed into her seat, kissed her thousand-carat engagement ring, CLOSED THE WINDOWS AND WENT TO SLEEP. It was practically like riding a bus the whole way there! (Okay, so I listened to Halcyon anyway. Huffily.) Got to Denver around 7:30-ish. My good friend Mike picked us up in his car and drove us back to his apartment, where we were crashing for the week.
One of the things that always bewilders me is how people plan trips so that they have to bounce off the plane and directly into a full day of activities. This never actually works! By the time you're done travelling for hours and dealing with all the technicalities and such, you're POOPED. Especially if we were staying up all night the night before. You end up exhausted and playing catchup for the rest of the trip, and you never get as much out of it as you would if you were well-rested. So, according to plan, I crashed at Mike's place for a few hours of well-deserved sleep. I told them that they could go do whatever they'd like, because Kate is a inertia-laden little whirlwind and I just knew she'd caffeinate the hell out of herself before we left. While I slept, they went to Red Rocks and a couple of other things (which we ended up re-doing later anyway), which I'll just leave her to narrate when she does hers.
They came back, and we stopped by an outdoor mall that I forget the name of, but it was uppity and expensive - I think we stayed long enough for me to use the theater bathroom. Then went to some dive bar for dinner and hanging out, I guess it was recommended by a friend of his. I saw tamales on the menu, and I'd never had them before, so I thought I'd give them a shot. I couldn't even finish one, they were absolutely horrible. Gave me a stomachache for a good 24 hours, at least. Bleh. Left there just after dark and made our way up to Lookout Mountain. THAT was amazing. All the city was lit up and spread below us, and there was this cool breeze coming down the mountain that was just on the delicious edge of chilly. Denver has two large mesas in the middle of it, and they formed these fascinating black voids against the sparkling lights of everything else. It was really something else - it was also something else to drive up and down mountain roads for the first time. One bad turn, and you're toast. And it's dark. Cheers!
FRIDAY - Got up bright and afternoony, and made our way to the Falling Rock Tap House near Coors Field. It's the largish bar that has shelves and shelves of bottles of every beer you've ever heard of, and has a ton of them on tap. Apparently we were really early, because after sitting at the booth for a while, the bartender told us that the wait staff weren't there yet and if we wanted anything we should just order at the bar. Kate ordered some local red beer, and I asked for a peach hard cider they advertised on tap. Mine didn't taste peachy at all - the bartender said that they were out, so he gave me what they had, Strongbow. I was disappointed, I can get Strongbow on tap back at Gus O'Connor's. Nothing old during vacation! Only new! So I looked at the menu again, and they had trappist ale. This is beer that was actually brewed by monks in Germany. It comes in "Single" (regular strength), "Dubbel" (double strength), and "Trippel" (you get the idea). I asked for one kind, he said they didn't have it, and I told him to give me whatever kind they DID have. He gave me a dubious look, and said that they had a Dubbel, but it would cost $9.50 for the bottle. I really didn't care at that point, so I took it - it came with a wine glass to drink it in. (Here's the thing: everything I drank that trip came in a wine glass...except the wine.) It was spectacular for a dark beer - a little nutty, dark flavour, slightly bitter aftertaste. Kate didn't like it. I'll be honest, I don't know how much of it was me actually liking the beer, and how much was me saying, "okay, I just dropped ten bucks on a single bottle of beer, I'd better like it." I suppose it doesn't matter, I liked it.
After the tap house, we drove up Baseline Road, which winds up an even bigger mountain than Lookout. There was a place to go sightseeing at the top, and that's where the pictures of Mike and I and Kate and I with an open backdrop were taken. Something about the sun shining on the bare stone and the breeze along the mountaintop was completely energizing. I climbed a boulder for the hell of it. I still don't know why. It was fun.
Baseline sent us down into the town of Boulder, otherwise known as West Hippieville. We strolled through a much less-snooty street market, and investigated some of the more new-agey book stores there. We also ate at Old Chicago Pizza, which I thought was some sort of interesting Denver restaurant tucked into the market, but turns out to be a chain that we just don't have in Michigan. (Oh well! As long as it's not in Michigan!) The big thing we did in that town was going to the Boulder Tea House.
The story is, they made Boulder a sister city of some town in China, and the Chinese mayor's gift to Boulder was to build an entire tea house, tear it down into manageable sections, and then ship the entire thing to Boulder to be reconstructed. Pretty wild. They've got a wide selection of teas, and you can order food but don't have to. Mike got to drink Gunpowder Tea, Kate got some boring Silverthorn Green Tea or whatever, and I got a display tea called White Jasmine Moon Blossom. Mike and Kate's tea was the usual basic steeped tea, but for mine they brought me a pot of hot water, a wine glass, and a green pod. You put the pod in the glass, fill it with hot water, and as the tea steeps the pod "blossoms" into a flower-shape with whitish petals at the center. I'm not huge on tea, but I like strong white tea, and by the time that thing was done blossoming it was perfect. We also tried an infusion - sparkling red wine infused with hibiscus tea. It came in a champagne flute. Figures.
The way the place was set up, the bathrooms were right past the only cash register. After we'd sat for a while, Mike was looking the other way, and Kate said to me, "I'm going to go to the bathroom. Is it okay if we pick up Mike's tea since it's not expensive and he's driving us around?" I said sure, and off she went. She came back, we gathered our stuff, and left. After walking about two blocks, our waiter comes running up to us all out-of-breath. Apparently, I had assumed that Kate was paying our bill since she was going in that direction, and Kate had assumed that I was going to take care of the check while she was in the bathroom, while the waiter never brought the check at all. Very embarrassed, we hurried back there and paid our bill, leaving him a 100% tip (the bill only came to about ten dollars).
Finally, we went up to Blackhawk, the casino town. It just looked like a couple of blocks of buildings. We dropped about $20 each on the penny slots, just to say we did. On the way there and back, though, the road followed these amazing rushing rapids next to a sheer cliff face. We stopped and got out, and I laid on this rock that overhung the river, and stayed there for quite a while. There was just something amazing about it, the soft noise of the water that let you not have to think anything, and the sturdiness of the rocks.
SATURDAY - We'd planned to go to the Colorado Renaissance Festival in the morning, but I wasn't feeling great, so we ended up not going. I can't remember if we went someplace else or not that day, that might have been when we drove through Red Rocks and such. At night we rode a trolley around for hours, picked up something for a friend at Hard Rock Cafe, and tried hunting down a really good Goth club for Kate to stomp around in. Turns out the entire block was closed down, and we three are standing there in respirators and dreadfalls and labcoats and blackblackblack with nothing to do but get stared at. Oh well! Peoplewatching on the trolley was fun.
SUNDAY - Mike was/is a member of our local gaming group, so we went to sit in on a session with his NEW group and see what it's like. I had a lot of fun, played a cleric named Tabitha Nekona who tried for all of one session to get the party to see the value of smiting your enemies. We drove around a little after that, and met up with Mike's friend Tanya. It was amazing how different her personality was from mine. We said we were a little tired and were looking forward to just sitting around and not doing a lot. Her suggestion? The "Red Bull Nitro Energy Blitzfest Concert Tour 2009". Not even kidding - I might be off by a word or two, but I can't find it on Google. Because nothing says "chillax" like NITRO ENERGY. Instead, we went to a different dive bar, failed terribly at pool, and hung out at her house for a while.
MONDAY - Time to wrap things up with a bang! Off to Colorado Springs, maybe a couple of hours away. The highways were so strange - they kept having these gravel trails going straight up the mountain so that truck whose brakes went out could stop without driving off the mountain. We assume. On the way back the trails went off a cliff, which worries me. We couldn't get into the Air Force Cathedral because apparently we're neither Air Force nor Catholic. Big surprise there.
Instead, we headed to Cave of the Winds. We went to the counter to buy our tickets around 2:00, and we were faced with the choice of the Regular Tour, which consisted of going a handful of feet into the tunnel with screaming children and ooh-ing at the cement floor they laid down (total time: 30 mins), or going on the Lantern Tour, which was an hour and a half long, covered 3/4 of a mile of caves, and was lit by rustic kerosene lanterns. We chose the latter, bought the tickets, and found out that it wasn't till 6:00. Rather than waiting around and having to skip the last item on the list, we decided to do that one first. Back in the car, and down to a town called Manitou Springs.
Let me lay Manitou Springs out for you - it's like someone on lots of interesting pharmaceuticals designed Mackinaw City and forgot to put in parking lots. I'm not exaggerating in the LEAST when I say there was not a single parking spot in town. I don't even know what these hippies were there for, the biggest attraction I could fathom out of the crowd was a fudge shop and some antique stores. It was so bad that someone pulled over in the center-of-town turn lane, popped their emergency blinkers on, and went to do whatever it is these people were on about, presumably finding a way to create fudge antiques. We HAD to stop there, though, because a friend of Kate's that lived there at some point (first clue this was a bad idea) had told her about a Pirate Bar called the Ancient Mariner Tavern. We cruised around until someone pulled out of their expensive spot, we paid the machine, and walked about five blocks to this place. Kate said at some point that we could turn back if we had to, but Mike and I were having none of it. I had done my research on this place, knew there was a hole in the wall leading next door to a pizza parlor that you could order food from, and I was gonna get me some Pirate Pizza.
We walked in, and were infinitely underwhelmed. There was NOTHING piratey about the bar, the only things vaguely nautical were some buoys stapled to the wall and fishnet covering holes in the ceiling. There was a jukebox and a lone pool table, and...well, it wasn't even really a bar, there were families with babies there. But we were NOT about to be turned away - we were exhausted, goofy, hundreds of miles from home, and fully aware of the fact we could do anything that didn't get us thrown in jail and never offend anyone we'd ever see again. So, we crashed at a table, were handed menus, and ordered. I forget what Mike got. Kate got some red beans and rice that looked like it came out of a can, and the waiter forgot to get her a spoon to eat it with. He asked me what I wanted, I held up the back of the menu, and pointed to the Pizza heading. "I would like a Pirate Pizza. A Pepperoni Pirate Pizza, Please." He looked oddly at the menu, and asked with forced lightheartedness if that was actually on there. I took his pen from him and offered to write it in if he'd like. He said that'd be alright, he could tell already we were going to be one of THOSE tables, and went away.
After a couple of comments on the decor (a plant on the railing by my head growing in a plastic beer cup, Mike said I should put it on the table and ask for a refill), we decided that the only way to make this an authentic Pirate Bar would be to board and scupper the thing. We got change, and beelined for the pool table and jukebox. I led the song progression off with a couple of Gorillaz songs containing lines about shaking your rear end, to scare off the fundie parents. I then cued up every Flogging Molly song I could find, made sure it was as loud as possible. Mike and I proceeded to play pool, yelling "ARRRRRRRRR" every time we sank a ball (don't worry, it wasn't often). My Pepperoni NON-PIRATE Pizza came back, and rather than risking further ire and possibly plank-walking ceremonies, my dear loving wife used ketchup to draw the Jolly Roger on it. They turned down our Flogging Molly, and we paid and left.
We cursed the town to ashes and drove back to the Cave Of The Winds, made sure where we needed to be, and went on our tour. They took our photos, led us all the way through the kiddie portion, gave us these flickering lanterns that could be blown out by Cave Of The Winds Wind, and told us what we'd be seeing. At this point, I find it important to point out that I only have two phobias, two very real fears of very irrational things. One is spiders, though I've been encountering them enough that I'm getting over it. The other I managed to forget for at least a month, between the time that we decided that a journey through Cave Of The Winds would be a focal point of our trip, and the time that the guide told us we couldn't turn back and my tubby 6'1" frame would be going through a gap hundreds of feet long, 4 feet tall, and two feet wide. Then, and only then, I realized what a bad idea this was with my crippling claustrophobia. Unfortunately, Rich (our tour guide) was very firm that I could not turn back or wander off on my own, in response to my desperate pleas and hyperventilating.
You see, our tour guide Rich was a bit of a jerk. His first rule was that this is a family-friendly tour, and as such there would be no cussing. If you hit your head on a rock, you say "rock is HARD!". If you fall in water, you say, "water is WET!" If someone burns you with their lantern, presumably during the five minutes they were actually lit, you say, "fire is HOT!". So on and so forth. I was quite obliging in our situation, humoring Rich by replacing the words I WOULD have said with "caves are NARROW" while trying to hold on to my sanity, and "Rich is an (INSERT EXPLETIVE HERE)" when he had us put out our lights in cramped chambers to tell us ghost stories and let the little kids stomp around until boulders fell on them. Okay, the boulder thing might not have actually happened, things are a little blurry around that point. At any rate, I actually did exceptionally well up until we were exiting the caves and both walls managed to brush both of my shoulders at the same time. After that I just remember little lights and Kate pushing me along the rest of the way. I made it though, of which I am eminently proud, and went soundly to bed.
TUESDAY - We thanked Mike for being so hospitable, and got on the plane. I paid the extra fifteen bucks for the window seat, and Orbital and clouds saw me the rest of the way to Detroit. Jo graciously picked us up at the airport, and before we knew it we were back home.
That's probably not ALL of the stories, I know there are others, but those are the ones that seem to make the right story for a long telling. It was really amazing. Kate adored it. Hopefully we'll be back again, for long or for short. I'll just have to remember to stay away from Manitou Springs, we're probably banned from some bars there by now. Yarr.
THURS - Drove to my sister Jo's apartment at about 2:30 am after staying up all night. Parked the car, hopped in our friend Jessie's, and she dropped us off at the airport around 4:00. Went through security, which did NOT take two hours, and slept at the gate until it was time to board. At this point, I should say that I ADORE plane flights. They're one of the best things in the world, seriously. Watching the clouds go by and the city reduced to squares and circles and lines - it's amazing. I have yet to go a takeoff without gazing meaningfully through the window and listening to Orbital's "Halcyon + On + On". (Name that reference and I'm proud of you.) Well - except THIS flight. You see, they no longer just put you next to the window in a flight, even if you're in the cheap seats and put the little preference on your ticket - they charge you extra for it when you check in. And I didn't. And the girl who apparently DID climbed into her seat, kissed her thousand-carat engagement ring, CLOSED THE WINDOWS AND WENT TO SLEEP. It was practically like riding a bus the whole way there! (Okay, so I listened to Halcyon anyway. Huffily.) Got to Denver around 7:30-ish. My good friend Mike picked us up in his car and drove us back to his apartment, where we were crashing for the week.
One of the things that always bewilders me is how people plan trips so that they have to bounce off the plane and directly into a full day of activities. This never actually works! By the time you're done travelling for hours and dealing with all the technicalities and such, you're POOPED. Especially if we were staying up all night the night before. You end up exhausted and playing catchup for the rest of the trip, and you never get as much out of it as you would if you were well-rested. So, according to plan, I crashed at Mike's place for a few hours of well-deserved sleep. I told them that they could go do whatever they'd like, because Kate is a inertia-laden little whirlwind and I just knew she'd caffeinate the hell out of herself before we left. While I slept, they went to Red Rocks and a couple of other things (which we ended up re-doing later anyway), which I'll just leave her to narrate when she does hers.
They came back, and we stopped by an outdoor mall that I forget the name of, but it was uppity and expensive - I think we stayed long enough for me to use the theater bathroom. Then went to some dive bar for dinner and hanging out, I guess it was recommended by a friend of his. I saw tamales on the menu, and I'd never had them before, so I thought I'd give them a shot. I couldn't even finish one, they were absolutely horrible. Gave me a stomachache for a good 24 hours, at least. Bleh. Left there just after dark and made our way up to Lookout Mountain. THAT was amazing. All the city was lit up and spread below us, and there was this cool breeze coming down the mountain that was just on the delicious edge of chilly. Denver has two large mesas in the middle of it, and they formed these fascinating black voids against the sparkling lights of everything else. It was really something else - it was also something else to drive up and down mountain roads for the first time. One bad turn, and you're toast. And it's dark. Cheers!
FRIDAY - Got up bright and afternoony, and made our way to the Falling Rock Tap House near Coors Field. It's the largish bar that has shelves and shelves of bottles of every beer you've ever heard of, and has a ton of them on tap. Apparently we were really early, because after sitting at the booth for a while, the bartender told us that the wait staff weren't there yet and if we wanted anything we should just order at the bar. Kate ordered some local red beer, and I asked for a peach hard cider they advertised on tap. Mine didn't taste peachy at all - the bartender said that they were out, so he gave me what they had, Strongbow. I was disappointed, I can get Strongbow on tap back at Gus O'Connor's. Nothing old during vacation! Only new! So I looked at the menu again, and they had trappist ale. This is beer that was actually brewed by monks in Germany. It comes in "Single" (regular strength), "Dubbel" (double strength), and "Trippel" (you get the idea). I asked for one kind, he said they didn't have it, and I told him to give me whatever kind they DID have. He gave me a dubious look, and said that they had a Dubbel, but it would cost $9.50 for the bottle. I really didn't care at that point, so I took it - it came with a wine glass to drink it in. (Here's the thing: everything I drank that trip came in a wine glass...except the wine.) It was spectacular for a dark beer - a little nutty, dark flavour, slightly bitter aftertaste. Kate didn't like it. I'll be honest, I don't know how much of it was me actually liking the beer, and how much was me saying, "okay, I just dropped ten bucks on a single bottle of beer, I'd better like it." I suppose it doesn't matter, I liked it.
After the tap house, we drove up Baseline Road, which winds up an even bigger mountain than Lookout. There was a place to go sightseeing at the top, and that's where the pictures of Mike and I and Kate and I with an open backdrop were taken. Something about the sun shining on the bare stone and the breeze along the mountaintop was completely energizing. I climbed a boulder for the hell of it. I still don't know why. It was fun.
Baseline sent us down into the town of Boulder, otherwise known as West Hippieville. We strolled through a much less-snooty street market, and investigated some of the more new-agey book stores there. We also ate at Old Chicago Pizza, which I thought was some sort of interesting Denver restaurant tucked into the market, but turns out to be a chain that we just don't have in Michigan. (Oh well! As long as it's not in Michigan!) The big thing we did in that town was going to the Boulder Tea House.
The story is, they made Boulder a sister city of some town in China, and the Chinese mayor's gift to Boulder was to build an entire tea house, tear it down into manageable sections, and then ship the entire thing to Boulder to be reconstructed. Pretty wild. They've got a wide selection of teas, and you can order food but don't have to. Mike got to drink Gunpowder Tea, Kate got some boring Silverthorn Green Tea or whatever, and I got a display tea called White Jasmine Moon Blossom. Mike and Kate's tea was the usual basic steeped tea, but for mine they brought me a pot of hot water, a wine glass, and a green pod. You put the pod in the glass, fill it with hot water, and as the tea steeps the pod "blossoms" into a flower-shape with whitish petals at the center. I'm not huge on tea, but I like strong white tea, and by the time that thing was done blossoming it was perfect. We also tried an infusion - sparkling red wine infused with hibiscus tea. It came in a champagne flute. Figures.
The way the place was set up, the bathrooms were right past the only cash register. After we'd sat for a while, Mike was looking the other way, and Kate said to me, "I'm going to go to the bathroom. Is it okay if we pick up Mike's tea since it's not expensive and he's driving us around?" I said sure, and off she went. She came back, we gathered our stuff, and left. After walking about two blocks, our waiter comes running up to us all out-of-breath. Apparently, I had assumed that Kate was paying our bill since she was going in that direction, and Kate had assumed that I was going to take care of the check while she was in the bathroom, while the waiter never brought the check at all. Very embarrassed, we hurried back there and paid our bill, leaving him a 100% tip (the bill only came to about ten dollars).
Finally, we went up to Blackhawk, the casino town. It just looked like a couple of blocks of buildings. We dropped about $20 each on the penny slots, just to say we did. On the way there and back, though, the road followed these amazing rushing rapids next to a sheer cliff face. We stopped and got out, and I laid on this rock that overhung the river, and stayed there for quite a while. There was just something amazing about it, the soft noise of the water that let you not have to think anything, and the sturdiness of the rocks.
SATURDAY - We'd planned to go to the Colorado Renaissance Festival in the morning, but I wasn't feeling great, so we ended up not going. I can't remember if we went someplace else or not that day, that might have been when we drove through Red Rocks and such. At night we rode a trolley around for hours, picked up something for a friend at Hard Rock Cafe, and tried hunting down a really good Goth club for Kate to stomp around in. Turns out the entire block was closed down, and we three are standing there in respirators and dreadfalls and labcoats and blackblackblack with nothing to do but get stared at. Oh well! Peoplewatching on the trolley was fun.
SUNDAY - Mike was/is a member of our local gaming group, so we went to sit in on a session with his NEW group and see what it's like. I had a lot of fun, played a cleric named Tabitha Nekona who tried for all of one session to get the party to see the value of smiting your enemies. We drove around a little after that, and met up with Mike's friend Tanya. It was amazing how different her personality was from mine. We said we were a little tired and were looking forward to just sitting around and not doing a lot. Her suggestion? The "Red Bull Nitro Energy Blitzfest Concert Tour 2009". Not even kidding - I might be off by a word or two, but I can't find it on Google. Because nothing says "chillax" like NITRO ENERGY. Instead, we went to a different dive bar, failed terribly at pool, and hung out at her house for a while.
MONDAY - Time to wrap things up with a bang! Off to Colorado Springs, maybe a couple of hours away. The highways were so strange - they kept having these gravel trails going straight up the mountain so that truck whose brakes went out could stop without driving off the mountain. We assume. On the way back the trails went off a cliff, which worries me. We couldn't get into the Air Force Cathedral because apparently we're neither Air Force nor Catholic. Big surprise there.
Instead, we headed to Cave of the Winds. We went to the counter to buy our tickets around 2:00, and we were faced with the choice of the Regular Tour, which consisted of going a handful of feet into the tunnel with screaming children and ooh-ing at the cement floor they laid down (total time: 30 mins), or going on the Lantern Tour, which was an hour and a half long, covered 3/4 of a mile of caves, and was lit by rustic kerosene lanterns. We chose the latter, bought the tickets, and found out that it wasn't till 6:00. Rather than waiting around and having to skip the last item on the list, we decided to do that one first. Back in the car, and down to a town called Manitou Springs.
Let me lay Manitou Springs out for you - it's like someone on lots of interesting pharmaceuticals designed Mackinaw City and forgot to put in parking lots. I'm not exaggerating in the LEAST when I say there was not a single parking spot in town. I don't even know what these hippies were there for, the biggest attraction I could fathom out of the crowd was a fudge shop and some antique stores. It was so bad that someone pulled over in the center-of-town turn lane, popped their emergency blinkers on, and went to do whatever it is these people were on about, presumably finding a way to create fudge antiques. We HAD to stop there, though, because a friend of Kate's that lived there at some point (first clue this was a bad idea) had told her about a Pirate Bar called the Ancient Mariner Tavern. We cruised around until someone pulled out of their expensive spot, we paid the machine, and walked about five blocks to this place. Kate said at some point that we could turn back if we had to, but Mike and I were having none of it. I had done my research on this place, knew there was a hole in the wall leading next door to a pizza parlor that you could order food from, and I was gonna get me some Pirate Pizza.
We walked in, and were infinitely underwhelmed. There was NOTHING piratey about the bar, the only things vaguely nautical were some buoys stapled to the wall and fishnet covering holes in the ceiling. There was a jukebox and a lone pool table, and...well, it wasn't even really a bar, there were families with babies there. But we were NOT about to be turned away - we were exhausted, goofy, hundreds of miles from home, and fully aware of the fact we could do anything that didn't get us thrown in jail and never offend anyone we'd ever see again. So, we crashed at a table, were handed menus, and ordered. I forget what Mike got. Kate got some red beans and rice that looked like it came out of a can, and the waiter forgot to get her a spoon to eat it with. He asked me what I wanted, I held up the back of the menu, and pointed to the Pizza heading. "I would like a Pirate Pizza. A Pepperoni Pirate Pizza, Please." He looked oddly at the menu, and asked with forced lightheartedness if that was actually on there. I took his pen from him and offered to write it in if he'd like. He said that'd be alright, he could tell already we were going to be one of THOSE tables, and went away.
After a couple of comments on the decor (a plant on the railing by my head growing in a plastic beer cup, Mike said I should put it on the table and ask for a refill), we decided that the only way to make this an authentic Pirate Bar would be to board and scupper the thing. We got change, and beelined for the pool table and jukebox. I led the song progression off with a couple of Gorillaz songs containing lines about shaking your rear end, to scare off the fundie parents. I then cued up every Flogging Molly song I could find, made sure it was as loud as possible. Mike and I proceeded to play pool, yelling "ARRRRRRRRR" every time we sank a ball (don't worry, it wasn't often). My Pepperoni NON-PIRATE Pizza came back, and rather than risking further ire and possibly plank-walking ceremonies, my dear loving wife used ketchup to draw the Jolly Roger on it. They turned down our Flogging Molly, and we paid and left.
We cursed the town to ashes and drove back to the Cave Of The Winds, made sure where we needed to be, and went on our tour. They took our photos, led us all the way through the kiddie portion, gave us these flickering lanterns that could be blown out by Cave Of The Winds Wind, and told us what we'd be seeing. At this point, I find it important to point out that I only have two phobias, two very real fears of very irrational things. One is spiders, though I've been encountering them enough that I'm getting over it. The other I managed to forget for at least a month, between the time that we decided that a journey through Cave Of The Winds would be a focal point of our trip, and the time that the guide told us we couldn't turn back and my tubby 6'1" frame would be going through a gap hundreds of feet long, 4 feet tall, and two feet wide. Then, and only then, I realized what a bad idea this was with my crippling claustrophobia. Unfortunately, Rich (our tour guide) was very firm that I could not turn back or wander off on my own, in response to my desperate pleas and hyperventilating.
You see, our tour guide Rich was a bit of a jerk. His first rule was that this is a family-friendly tour, and as such there would be no cussing. If you hit your head on a rock, you say "rock is HARD!". If you fall in water, you say, "water is WET!" If someone burns you with their lantern, presumably during the five minutes they were actually lit, you say, "fire is HOT!". So on and so forth. I was quite obliging in our situation, humoring Rich by replacing the words I WOULD have said with "caves are NARROW" while trying to hold on to my sanity, and "Rich is an (INSERT EXPLETIVE HERE)" when he had us put out our lights in cramped chambers to tell us ghost stories and let the little kids stomp around until boulders fell on them. Okay, the boulder thing might not have actually happened, things are a little blurry around that point. At any rate, I actually did exceptionally well up until we were exiting the caves and both walls managed to brush both of my shoulders at the same time. After that I just remember little lights and Kate pushing me along the rest of the way. I made it though, of which I am eminently proud, and went soundly to bed.
TUESDAY - We thanked Mike for being so hospitable, and got on the plane. I paid the extra fifteen bucks for the window seat, and Orbital and clouds saw me the rest of the way to Detroit. Jo graciously picked us up at the airport, and before we knew it we were back home.
That's probably not ALL of the stories, I know there are others, but those are the ones that seem to make the right story for a long telling. It was really amazing. Kate adored it. Hopefully we'll be back again, for long or for short. I'll just have to remember to stay away from Manitou Springs, we're probably banned from some bars there by now. Yarr.