I know it’s been a while since my last post, so I’m going to do my best to recap everything that’s gone on.
On Wednesday, we left Lawrence and drove through Kansas, which is all you need to know about that day. It rained, and rained, and rained. It was, by far, the worst leg of the trip. (Ben just reminded me about one of the crazier moments in Lawrence, so I’ll touch on that real quick. As we were trekking through KU to find the main strip of bars, we crossed paths with an extremely troubled junkie sucking on a cigarette as if it was his last. As we walked past him, he immediately jumped and arched his back, gave us a bug-eyed stare, and reached his right hand into his trench-coat pocket as if he was reaching for a gun. We tried our hardest to keep stone-cold faces and our eyes straight ahead. We both mumbled under our breath, “Please don’t shoot us in the back.” I’m happy to say that he didn’t. We kept walking, thanking whomever, or whatever it was that saved our lives. We ended up having one of the most awesome barhopping sessions either of us have ever had.)
Once we reached the Colorado state line, it immediately cleared up. “Welcome to Colorful Colorado,” the sign said. We couldn’t have been happier. For the next 100 or so miles, we eagerly anticipated seeing the Rocky Mountains.
We got in touch with some friends and met up for a couple of rocky mountain fresh coors. We were exhausted. Then we went to Illegal Pete’s for a much needed 4lb burrito (for those of you that don’t know what Illegal Pete’s is, all I’ll say is that, in Ben’s words “CHIPOTLE AIN’T GOT $H*T ON ILLEGAL PETE’S!”).
We parted ways with our happy hour buddies and made our way over to an old friend of mine’s apartment in a suburb outside of Denver. It was excellent having a permanent residence for a few days and not having to worry about driving the next day. We took it slow, rested, and enjoyed the incredible view of the Rockies right off his balcony. I met this buddy of mine on the Israel trip back in ’06, which instigated by passion for the outdoors and, eventually, this trip. His hospitality could’ve only been matched by a Ritz-Carlton. We partied, chilled, explored, and unfortunately watched the Nuggets tank in the playoffs. Denver would’ve been a whole lot more fun if they had won. Everyone was bummed. “There’s always next year,” we would say. Everybody else just wanted to fight or drink their sorrows away (which would become even more apparent when they got eliminated on Friday night)
Thursday was a pretty special day. We got to experience Boulder, CO, the town Colorado University calls home. We met up with my buddy and some his frat brothers, and we had one amazing afternoon. We walked around Pearl Street, which is an AMAZING strip of shops, restaurants, and street performers. We went into one of the coolest toy stores I’ve ever been into. Well, it was more like a kite store than a toy store (see pictures!). Then we went into a couple of awesome specialty stores with little knickknacks and special edition Nike shoes. Then we went to the Walnut Brewery for lunch. AWESOME place! Delicious beer brewed right in the restaurant, accompanied by various savory lunch entrees; it really doesn’t get much better than that. Or so we thought.
After lunch, we spontaneously decided to add another hour to our road trip and go to Golden, CO to experience the Coors Brewery. Firstly, the tour of the brewery was free, which automatically made it worth the drive and got us extremely excited to taste free rocky mountain freshness. If you didn’t already know, Coors brews a pretty wide variety of beers (Blue Moon, Blue Moon Seasonal, Killian’s, Molson, Coors Banquet, Coors Light, Keystone, Keystone Light, and Keystone Ice). When we started the tour, the first room we came across was the brew room. The aroma of all the different beers brewing (the technical term for this stage is “wart,” when the sugars are still being separated from the brew) was unbelievable; an incredibly strong, sweet, meaty smell invaded our senses. We kinda drifted through the “educational” part of the tour and quickly got to the first tasting, which was a small cup of Coors Banquet (which is called the “banquet beer” because Mr. Coors would supply this beer at each and every banquet he would hold for his workers!). This small cup of Coors Banquet was easily distinguishable from the Coors Banquet available anywhere else for two reasons. First, all Coors in the west have around 2% more alcohol content and secondly, and most importantly, this cup of Coors Banquet had never seen light or heat of any kind. This Coors was as fresh as it gets. Next was the real tasting. We each got 3 free beers. I started with a Molson, and then had a Killian’s, then finally a Coors Light straight out of an icy tap. We met some fun people in the process, too! Then we headed back to the place we were staying at to get some much-needed rest.
Friday was pretty relaxed apart from the super intense P90X workout session (look it up if you don’t already know about it; it’s AMAZING). Later that afternoon, we went to the mall to just browse around. We ended up coming across the best store in comedic history! Sur la Table! (check out the pics) We couldn’t resist going inside and asking them if they had a margarita machine. “Of course!” the clerk lady said, “Right this way!” Ben and I immediately starting chuckling, then right around the corner, in the middle of the store, there it was. A REAL MARGARITAVILLE! We burst out in laughter. The clerks asked us what was so funny. After we had explained to them that this was almost the main topic in an episode of south park, they understood. “Trey Parker even owns one of those! He comes in all the time!” she said, “The episode is even posted on our website!” That made our day.
After that, we went to my buddy’s softball game, which was pretty sick; 2 homers and an inside the park homer. We sat up in the stand [classily] heckling the other team while enjoying more rocky mountain freshness. Then we went back to my buddy’s place to finish watching the Nuggets get pounded by the Lakers. We continued to party and ended up at a local bar. We got pretty rowdy.
In a blink of an eye, it was Saturday morning. “What happened last night?” Ben said. That just about summed up our stay in Denver.
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