Forty Pounds of Wet Corn: Colorado, day six

 Alright, so I am almost to the point where I am caught up! I finished a blog for two days ago this morning, and now I am at yesterday. And yesterday was relatively low key, so I may be able to finish this blog before we leave for our day down in the springs. Which should also be pretty low key. I don't think we have anything really intense planned until Durango, and even that may be nixed. There has been a lot of pivoting on this trip, and I have been doing my best to manage my disappointment, but it's really fucking hard. There's a lot of masking going on, and I am mentally exhausted. I fell asleep last night at around 10:30 because I've just been so drained from managing myself. I still catch myself trying not to be too autistic around people. I hate that. 

Yesterday was supposed to be the Denver Botanic Gardens, then Boulder to do the Flatirons loop. Only one of those things happened. 

We went to the Botanic Gardens, and then made a plan to go to Bang Up The Elephant, a vegan Carribean restaurant. There is a really great installation at the Botanic Gardens called Spirit Guides, done by Mexican artists, and I was so excited to see it. Plus the Denver Botanic Gardens are very nice, and Derek and I live to wander around and photograph flowers at botanical gardens. 

I took a few photos of the sculptures to send to Rhyann!

I really thought this stairway was so fucking pretty. I could totally see doing wedding or engagement photos there. 

It was an absolutely beautiful day out. Gorgeous sky, warm but not oppressive, light breeze. 

My dad and Caryn, enjoying the reflection ponds!

I have always wanted one of these butterfly mosaic floating pieces. I think they're so pretty. 

After the botanical gardens, we tooled around at Natural Grocer for a bit, I grabbed some more kelp noodles for myself, and then we made our way to Bang Up the Elephant. Which...I don't know why I was expecting it to not be gentrified, but it totally was. My experience was disappointing. 

They got the plantains and tortilla chip basket, with cauliflower wingers. I was not excited about either thing. Gross is too kind a word. 

This was Derek's fry bread with curried chickpeas. He says it was great, I was nonplussed. 

This was my seitan cubano bowl. And it just tasted like fuckin' mustard. Again. Unhappy. 

Caryn's cassareep bowl, which Derek and I want to learn how to make now. Cassareep is a boiled down cassava syrup sauce, and it sounds AMAZING. 

I ordered callalloo, but they never brought it to me. Caryn, my dad, and Derek ordered sweetened plantains (THE HIGHLIGHT OF THE MEAL, OH MY GOD), peas and rice (also pretty good), and waffle fries (waffle fries). 

I couldn't really eat anything, everything had sugar in it, so I was hungry and annoyed, and doubly annoyed at what I was hoping would be an all around better dining experience from ownership down to presentation and food. Thoroughly disappointed. After we ate, Derek wanted to go to Rocky Mountain Arsenal, but none of us really felt like going, so we drove back to the townhouse. Derek bought a gorgeous little piece for the studio, pictured in a second, and on our way to go pick it up, I was thrilled to see a patch of lenticular cliuds!

We also saw a church sign for The Church of the Holy Comforter, and we both laughed about that for a few minutes. I did not get a good enough photo, we were driving by too fast. 

Here is our new studio piece!!! It is so gorgeous, I can't wait to get the studio finished up so we can get everything going and I can take a better photo of it.

And that was pretty much our day. We all ate leftovers from the previous few days, watched Jibaro from Love, Death, and Robots (my dad and Caryn were not fans), and then watched Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, but both my dad and I were too tired to finish it and we went to bed, leaving Caryn and Derek to finish the movie. 

Up next: A fairly uneventful day in the springs!

Forty Pounds of Wet Corn: Clorado, Day Five

 Let's see if I can get caught up!! It is the evening of the 3rd, and today was actually a pretty chill day. But I will write about today after I write about yesterday.

Yesterday was Rocky Mountain National Park, where we were supposed to do the big lake loop to see Bear, Dream, Nymph, Haiyaha, and Emerald Lake. I did this hike years ago with a girlfriend of mine, and I thought it was just the prettiest hike ever. 

We learned a couple of days ago that past Dream lake, there was too much fucking snow pack to get through without microspikes. Which made me so fucking ANGRY. 

The drive up was still beautiful, though!!

We were scheduled to do a light hike through the open space at the Flatirons (today), but bad news from the future: we did not. They are awfully pretty, though!

So many of these photos are just things I thought were beautiful in the moment. SO many cell phone photos of things my brain made yummy sounds over. 

Eeeeeeee! There they are! It's the Rockies!!!

We stopped at a couple of scenic overlooks so we could scenically overlook everything. This was the first one we stopped at. So scenic!

And in case the front of the info board wasn't informative enough for you, the back has you covered:

Complete with penis. Tee hee!

It really was very scenic. 

My dad got into the ussie game with me!!

And here's my dad and Caryn! Derek did not get out of the car. No ussies of us.

I got so excited seeing the Rockies peek through the hills of Roosevelt National Forest!

We made a stop at the Beaver Meadows Visitor's Center to go pee, to tool around before our entrance pass time, and perhaps to get our national park pass, whicch we weren't able to, we had to get that at the gate. The only photos I took over there where on my real camera, but we saw a momma moose with her little beebee! Derek and I followed, at a very respectable distance, of course, to take photos of momma and baby, but I think Derek may be the only one who got anything of any note. 

When we got back on the road, the line to get in to RMNP was pretty long. This beautiful little vista was outside to my right while we were waiting, and it was just so pretty in the moment. My entire time writing these blogs....75% of it has been going through my phone trying to decide which "this is so pretty right now!" photos I should keep to post, and which ones I should get rid of. 

There's the line! Except I took this about 10 minutes into our wait, we had been way further back. But there is no real basis for comparsion available, you'll have to just take my word for it and imagine how much longer the line looked. 

Another beautiful vista! I had, at this point, sent off at least 10 minutes of videos to both my wifey and my oldest, because it was just so gorgeous out. I sent one video to my work wife later in the evening, but I had wanted to send her all of them, too. 

We decided to travel up the mountain to the Bear Lake Trailhead, even though we would not be taking the trail because of the snowpack. This is the view of the mountains that the trail is nestled through, and it is so beautiful:

And this is the direct view overheead of the trailhead. Derek was excitedly saying that seeing just the trailhead makes him want to live here to be doing the trails all the time. Which we both agreed, if I get that PhD candidacy, we will for sure be out hiking RMNP fucking constantly. Derek and I tried to do this trail together once, but simikarly to our arrival on this day, there was just too much fucking snow when we came out. 

There's my daddy, at the trailhead division! You can see all the snow on the ground, so I suspect in about two weeks, the trail will be fine to go on without microspikes (that was the thing...the trail COULD have been done, but you needed microspikes past Dream, and my dad was not interested in buying/renting a pair, and Derek and I didn't bring ours because we both didn't think we would need them, and we forgot). 

So I haven't seen Flattop Mountain, Fern Lake, or Bierstadt Lake, but I've seen everything else on the signs! 

More snow!

HEre's Daddy Tucci, lookin' through binoculars to check out the sights!

And then we made our way out. We had a reservation for The Stanley Hotel Tour at 4pm. My dad is a huge Stephen King fan, and he really wanted to see "The Overlook Hotel", so I booked him a tour several months ago as a birthday present (his birthday is next month). 

The beautiful view on our way out:

We arrived at The Stanley a little bit late, but they brought us in to the where the tour currently was and caught us up on the way. My dad and Caryn, sitting nicely for the tour guide:

The view from the veranda, through the window:

The photo of all of the ghosts at the Overlook from The Shining:

The parking lot:

The  hotel'smain entrance, which we learned on the tour...was the fucking GUEST HOUSE 

The lobby of the hotel, with my dad and Caryn for scale:

Derek and my dad, listening to the tour guide talk in the room that used to be the hotel bar, telling the tale of Stephen King's fateful stay at The Stanley. 

And the famous Stephen King room, room 217. I trieed to book this room for my dad as another birthday present, but not only is it ungodly expensive, it is also booked out. For the next three fucking years. 

And when the tour was over, we got back in the car and headed home. You are not allowed to just mill around the hotel, they really make sure you know that it's for GUESTS ONLY, which feels absurd. Those tour tickets were 50 bucks a pop, and they only take you to two places? Come the fuck on. 

Derek and started a bulgogi marinade that morning before we left in preparation for a big ass meal when we returned home that night. The meal:

There was bulgogi, rice, kimchi, yu choy, marinated bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, and lettuce for wrapping. Everybody loved the food. I made myself vegan chicken with a greens mix and some riced broccoli, but I barely finished it. I started feeling very dizzy and very off, so I went to bed early. Derek crawled into bed very very late, smelling like booze, so I guess the evening must have gone quite nicely. 

Moving on to the next!