Forty pounds of wet corn: Colorado, day three

There's something I've noticed every single time I travel that I don't think people talk about enough:

When you travel, you find out what your clothes and home really smell like. 

I opened up my suitcase last night and I was like, ".....I do not like this iteration of home smell." I mentioned this to Derek, how when you travel, it gives you the chance to smell what you smell like on a regular basis, because you're surrounded by unfamiliar smells, and it really clarifies your general scent. 

He did not know what I was talking about. I told him I want to wash our clothes again, because our clothes smell a little bit like mildew, and he was like, "well yeah, my laundry stayed in the washer for a couple of days before I put them in the dryer."

Girl.

Rude. 

Now I smell like his dumb mildew clothes. I will wash my clothes tonight, I fell asleep last night without doing laundry, but I will not let that happen again. In fact, I may put them in the washer after I write this little blurb. 

So today is day three technically, but full day one. 

Our bed is so fucking uncomfortable. I woke up with a stabbing pain in my shoulder blade, scrunched up against my forever hot man piece. Only one of those things was a problem. I woke up wanting to have my toast, and finding no fucking toaster in this mug. Pretty upsetting. Derek said he would go buy a cheap toaster, so I made myself some coffee and sat down to blog while I waited for him to come back. 

My coffee was fucking gross. I bought a different kind of Torani sugar free syrup, I am guessing that was my first mistake, and my second mistake was trying Three Trees vanilla almond milk. I bought Chameleon Cold Brew, a very reliable favorite. I will say while I went on a fucked up spending spree at Sprouts, my No Thanks App was not working, so I have no idea if I bought shit on my no-fly list or not. The all over point is I hated my coffee, it tasted like splenda and made my mouth and tummy angry. So I dumped it and opted for a sugar free Red Bull. 

Today we pick up my dad and Caryn, and we go to MEOW WOLF. I am so fucking excited. I have been horned the fuck up to go to MeowWolf for years, and as a sidenote it is worth mentioning that my dad told me a few months ago that he was "horny for the colorado trip" and that was when I realized how off putting that phrase is?

So I am currently waiting for Derek to come back from his errands so I can make my toast, and then we will go pick up my dad and Caryn, and come back here, and fucking go to MeowWolf. The day of my god damn dreams. 

Edit:

We are now technically on day four of our trip, FULL day three. It is about 8am and I am up having my coffee while everybody else still sleeps. It's the perfect time to catch up on my blog. 

Ok, so MEOW WOLF. 

I don't know how long I've been waiting to go to MeowWolf. It's been a long time. I want to say about ten years? I think I caught wind of MeowWolf in about 2014, and I was like, oh fuck, that's the place for me. And I think I heard about it after Derek andI were in New Mexico to shoot a wedding, and I was gutted that I missed it. I've been trying to plan trips around getting to MeowWolf, but it just hasn't worked out. Until now. 

So on Thursday, we go to pick up my dad and Caryn from the airport. Derek and I are at the townhouse, having a light little snacky snack, minding our business and expecting to leave in about twenty minutes to pick them up, when I get a text from my dad saying, "just landed". Well fuck. Derek and I throw our shit together and get in the car, heading off to pick them up, take them back to rest for a bit, and then get going to fuckin' MeowWolf. On the way to the airport, we notice that Denver proper is just god damn lousy with hail from the previous night's storm:

Cool.

Derek and I had been marveling on the way in that the mountains did seem awfully snow packed for End of May/Beginning of June. More on that later. 

The traffic coming out of the Denver airport was fucking ridiculous. Derek and I could not for the life of us figure out why it was so jam packed. We picked up my dad and Caryn, suffered through the unexplainable traffic to get back to the AirBnB, changed, relaxed for a few minutes, and then herded ourselves back into the car to head to MeowWolf. 

I don't even know where to begin with MeowWolf. I have no idea what I was expecting, but it somehow exceeded expectations and failed to rise to the occasion? I think I was somehow expecting the materials to be less...chintzy? A word I just looked up because I didn't know its origins and I wanted to make sure it wasn't one of those words like "gyp", with all kinds of nasty roots that we shouldn't be using, but we don't know where the word comes from because we just adopt words that we are socialized to use without understanding where they come from. Chintz, in case you're curious, is a Hindi word used to describe fabric. Cool!

Anyway, the materials looked kinda cheap, but like, it's also all local artists making everything and what kind of veneer should I really be expecting? The overall effect is fucking fantastic. I took a billion photos, but I'm only going to pot half a billion.

Obviously Derek and I had to start with our usual ussie Derek is wearing his "Jesus is coming, open your moth" shirt, and he got so many compliments on it. 

I took a selfie, but I look like a tired ol' bitch. Which, if I'm being honest...I am.

In the elevator to Convergence Station!!

Derek said this reminded him of Stranger Things, I can see it. 

This was my favorite part of MeowWolf, the office dedicated to finding a cryptid called the Yawlp. That book was so funny, I had to open it. The inside of it was Jason Bourne. Which made me laugh very loudly. 

This office was where I learned that I needed to touch everything. I tried to open the drawer because I wanted to see if there was anything hidden in there, and there was! So from that point forward, I touched EVERYTHING and tried to open everything and pushed on everything. Which did lead to me finding a very hidden room that I didn't see another person go into or come out of. MeowWolf out there rewarding curiosity!

There was a couple sitting on this little bench for fifteen minutes, and I really wanted to grab a street photography style photo of them, but I felt weird about it, because there was really nowhere for me to hide. So I just waited for them to leave so I could take a photo of the window itself, which I loved. 

Ok, so I REALLY want to talk about this. There was a full room with the words WHEELCHAIR SPORTS CAMP spraypainted on the wall, there was a wheelchair on the ceiling, with prosthetics hanging from the ceiling, as well. There was a door, that went right into a sensory deprivation room that I assumed was for ND folks that need to escape the sensory overload of MeowWolf, and the door was covered...absolutely littered...with photos of activists for the disabled community. And then I saw this in the bus system from Convergence Station, and by the time I saw this, I was fairly irritated by the glaring accessibility issues I had been noticing. So I was curious about the Gang of 19, so I looked them up when I got home, unsure of whether or not this was a piece of "art" for the installation, or a genuine piece of history. Turns out, it was a genuine piece of history:

"Gang of 19" activisits occupy denver instersection to protest inaccessibility on the city's bus system

Which I love, ableism is totally baked into our day to day lives so hard that we don't even realize it, and seeing the activists who put their lives on the line to advocate for themselves and those who would come after them highlighted at an art installation was great. 

However.

It rang so fucking HOLLOW, because when I say that there was a whole metric fuckton of shit that Caryn couldn't access because she was in a wheelchair, I mean it. There are elevators around the place to get from level to level, and that's fine, but there were hallways that were too narrow for chair accessibility, there were areas where people wouldn't be able to reach because stairs were the only way in or out (like the office dedicated to finding the Yawlp), and like, how much can disability advocacy highlighting mean if you're not even bothering to walk the fucking walk of the place you built from the fucking ground up? I was pretty god damn irritated about it the entire time I was wandering around eowWolf. It was the biggest detraction from my enjoyment. That being said, Derek and I will be returning because my dad and Caryn couldn't hack it for as long as we couuld, and they wanted to leave. I suppose I will wait and post pictures of MeowWolf when we return on the 10th. 

After MeowWolf, we went back to the townhouse, rested for a bit, and then went back to Jinya for dinner. I forrgot my phone, so there are no photos of all of us enjoying our first dinner out together. We went back to the townhouse, dropped Caryn off, and my dad, Derek, and I went grocery shopping. Derek and I saw a massive strip mall full of Asian restaurants, an international grocery store, Mexican grocery stores, Mexican restaurants, we were so excited to explore. We grabbed groceries, headed back to the townhouse, and we all crashed the fuck out. It had been a long day. 

Stay tuned for tomorrow, where we go to Hanging Lake with fucking disastrous results.