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!

Forty Pounds of Wet Corn: Colorado, day four

I am operating in the future, trying to get back on track so I can blog the prior activities of the day before bed time. Here's to hoping I get caught up this evening, but as I sit here and type I find myself getting exceptionally sleepy. 

Alright, so this is covering day two of our trip, where we went to Hanging Lake. And I mean. If we're talking about starting trips off with a bang as a way to determine the calibur of the trip...this trip is going to be a fucking disappointment for everyone but my dad. The dark horse of the day trip to Hanging Lake. 

The drive up to Hanging Lake was very, very nice. It's a gorgeous drive, we all sat and chatted and had a nice time. About 45 minutes from the trailhead, we got stuck in a traffic jam because the 70 was closed for reasons. We drove down the grassy, hilly median and turned around, stopped at a gas station to pee and fume, and then took a different way to skirt around the traffic. We arrived to Hanging Lake right on time, got fantastic parking, got our shit together and made our way to the trail. It was such a gorgeous day!

The gorge on the way to the trailhead. 

Obviously an ussie to start our journey. I didn't wear my keffiyah on the trail, I didn't want it to get ruined. And a fucking good thing, too. 

The beginning of the trail! It was such a beautiful day, I was so excited to get going and make it to the top. The last time I did Hanging Lake was right after I broke my arm. Fairly immediately after, actually. My arm was still in a sling, and I hadn't really expected to do the hike due to my arm being freshly broken, so I wore flip flops. Derek and I made it to maybe the 5th bridge...he said the 4th when I asked him...before I was like, I don't know that I can make it, it really hurts my arm and I am not prepared sartorially for this journey. So Derek left me at a lovely, shady bench by a waterfall and I agreed to wait for him until he was done doing the hike. I'm not even sure he was gone fifteen minutes before I was like, "fuck this shit" and made my way up to the top, broken arm in a sling and flip flops on my feet. I made it to the top, which is definitely a feat in the state I was in, but I didn't get to take any photos, and the hike up is truly so fucking gorgeous that I wanted to go back with a camera and a tripod and take as many breaks as I wanted, in hiking boots and with two operational arms. When we landed on going to Colorado, one of the first things I said we had to do was Hanging Lake. I am still absolute TRASH at landscape photos, they are not my strongsuit. I can take a good one sometimes, but mostly I just take barely adequate landscapes, as will be obvious when I shitpost all of them after we get home from the trip. Anyway.

Here is Derek, getting ready to ascend ascend ascend! I stopped here to take a video of the first waterfall to send to the kids, and Derek fucked around with his cameras. Cameras plural. I would learn in about twenty minutes that he did not pare down his gear, he brought at least two bodies, both long lenses, the 180 macro (which is very heavy), and his tripod. For those of you playing the home game, that's a lot of very heavy gear. Derek and I are used to humping a shit ton of gear on hikes. We always have people stop us to marvel at our gear, ask how much we're carrying, and people always react with surprise when we tell them how much extra weight we're carrying up whatever moderately strenuous hike we're doing. I know I usually get a bit of a thrill out of that when it happens. I'm like, "what a special little beebee am I to be carrying all of this when most people seem to be struggling to carry their water!!" I suffer from main character syndrome a lot. 

I was moderately worried about doing this hike, just because it was the first full day here for my dad and Caryn, and it would involve some strenuous activity with a 1100 ft elevation gain, and there was not a lot of time to adjust to the altitude between arriving and hoofing it up a big ass rock. I knew I could do it, I knew Derek could do it, but I was worried about my dad and Caryn. Well. I should have been more worried about Derek. We hadn't even made it an eighth of the way up before Derek stopped three times, looking more fuckin' raggedy with each resting break. After the third, I was like, "excuse me, sir, but no. No more". Derek protested a LOT, but even Caryn was like, uh...no, Derek, you do not look like, your color is off you're sweating buckets, you need to turn around. Caryn went ahead while I argued with Derek about whether or not he was, in fact, staying behind. 

He ended up going back down. 

I moved ahead, and honestly I was feeling pretty fucking great. I hadn't remebered the layout of the trail, and it was a lot more steps thaan I recalled from doing it the first time. When I saw the trailhead I was like...oh no. Maybe I should have been doing thirty miles a day to prepare instead of 10, PLUS doing this at altitude?? I was concerned. But I felt great. I wasn't breathing hard, I didn't have a headache, I was drinking water every time I stopped with Derek, I was feeling really good. I caught up with Caryn, and she told me she was going to head back down, her knees were hurting her and she was at her limit. I told her where to find Derek, and to not let him out of her sight because he could not be trusted to not push past his limits. And up I went. My dad was still heading up, and was about fifteen minutes ahead of me, so I texted him that Caryn was heading back down, Derek was already back down, but I was heading up to meet him. We agreed to meet up with each other, and he figured he wouldn't wait because I was a faster hiker and he was needing a lot of rest, so we would meet up eventually. 

Another bridge! I took another video here for the kids, sent it to Rhyann because I still inexplicably had signal, and kept going. 

I stopped at this petrified looking stump (as in turned to rock, not scared, though I can't speak for the log, maybe it WAS terrified) because Derek had tightened my camera bag straps to my body so fucking ttight that I could not god damn move, and I was having a panic attack. It took me two minutes to wiggle out of the straps. I sent Derek a message that said, "my straps are too tight". I fixed them, had some water since I was stopped and figured it couldn't hurt, and then started back up. 

I passed by this gorgeous little fall, decided it wasn't what I wanted to photograph but I DID want to send a video for the kids, so I took a tiny video, sent it to Rhyann, and was getting ready to make my way forward when I noticed a pretty intense pressure building in my face. I texted Derek that my sinus pressure was intense, and it felt like my eyeballs were going to explode out of my nose (almost an exact quote). I moved along, but then saw these two kids just grabbing rocks and chucking them into the river and I was annoyed. This is disruptive behavior to ecosystems, and I was really angry about it. So I yelled, "HEY, LET'S NOT THROW ROCKS, IT'S DANGEROUS AND DISRUPTIVE". The person I am assuming was their dad, but was clearly their supervision, waved at them and was like, "oh hey, careful throwing rocks". I made my way past them, annoyed and thinking about what I would say to them if I saw them again on their way up and the kids started throwing rocks again. You know that socially anxious/ND thing where you just practice winning arguments in your head? I was doing that. For making an excellent verbal takedown...of children. I'm amazing. 

My face started absolutely pounding. Just wrenching pain. And then I felt something dripping out of my nose. I figured it was snot, since I had noticed an uptick in my allergy symptoms when we got to Colorado, so I put my finger to my nose to wipe it away...and it was blood. And I could feel it getting ready to gush out of my nose, so I pinched my nose, found a bench, and then leaned over the bench and just let my nose gush. For about ten minutes, I was just leaking like a faucet. Blood all over the place. And just as I had been practicing my harsh word for the rock throwing shitheads, I began to hope they would cross my path on their way up so I could be like, "THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T THROW ROCKS!!!!!" When I said this to Derek, he laughed and said it really was a shame that they didn't see my nosebleed. I wouldn't know it until later, but they were on their way down, not on their way up. 

When my nose finished gushing, I used my water to wash away as much of the blood on the ground as I could, texted Derek and my dad that I had a nosebleed and I was going back down, and then hated myself for having Von Willebrand's Disease. It's pretty much why I made myself stop ascending. I figured I had lost a lot of blood, and I didn't know that I wouldn't have another nosebleed. I had been telling Rhyann before Derek and I left that I had suffered nosebleeds fairly consistently when I first moved out to Colorado. One every couple of weeks. And they were bad nosebleeds. I was worried I would have one or two while we were here, and I had chatted with Derek about that, too. I gave myself a little pep talk that if I had any nosebleeds, I would chill out whatever it was that I was doing and take it easy for the rest of that day. So I did. I made my way back down, grumbling and fucking angry about my stupid fucking body and my stupid fucking nose. 

Derek and Caryn were at the same little picnic area that we stopped at on the way in, and Derek was still upset about me forcing him back down. He wouldn't talk to me and was just looking for cool rocks, of which he came home with a pocketful. 

Derek, Caryn, and I made our way back to the car, grabbed our lunches from the cooler, and had a picnic while we waited for my dad to make his way back down to us. We sat in very pleasant weather enjoying the scenery and our lovely lunches for about two hours before my dad made it back down. He's the only one of us who made it to the top, and I won't lie, I was fairly certain that, if the party broke up due to physical circumstances, it would be me who made it. I wouldn't have guessed my dad alone in a million years. Good thing I didn't put money on that. 

We got back in the car and drove the three hours back to Denver. We had planned on making bulgogi that night, so Derek and I were like, YUSSSSSSSSS, time to go to GW Market!!! We had been super excited to check it out since seeing it a few days before. 

We were unprepared for the glory. 

LOOK AT THE ENTRY. We knew we were in for a fucking shopping treat the second we walked in. Literally, the entire time we were walking around the store, we were like, this is it. We found our neighborhood. If I get the PhD program I'm applying to, this is the neighborhood I want to live in. So many great looking restaurants, this grocery store plus another few grocery stores in the same vicinity...we were in a paradise the likes of which we haven't even dared to dream about. 

We were greeted with an amazing quick eats section. 

AND THE BUNS!!!!! So many buns. But the bun section could not possibly hold a candle to THE FUCKING VEG. 

OH MY GOD. The mushroom selection? Premium. The eggplant selection? Choice. The cruciferous veg? Drool-worthy. Derek and I were so fucking excited the entire time 

And then my vegan reading comprehension was tested. If it's imitation vegetarian steak, is it...is it real meat? HELP ME I AM VEGAN AND DUMB. 

And then the seafood section was INCREDIBLE. 

...who is she. 

We were spending way too much time grabbing everything for bulgogi, but we needed to explore this immaculate heaven on earth. There was an entire other half of the building we hadn't yet explored. And it's where they housed all of the bowls and flatware and mostly non-edibles. 

I wanted to buy these for my dad, I thought he would like them. He barely chuckled at them when I showed him the picture. 

...sounds...illegal?

And look! The supermarket has games!!!

Derek and I really wanted to grab these, but decided not to. For reasons yet understandable to me.

I have no idea what this bowl was trying to tell u s, and I was so mystified that I wanted to buy it. But I will go back for it another time to unravel its mysteries. 

This was my favorite little guy. Again, I did not buy it, because we were trying to get the fuck out of there. By the time we got out of there, it was already 8:15. I still had to stop at a dispensary for my dad and we were still supposed to marinate the bulgogi for an hour. Given that, and given that we were all hungry, we decided to get Seoul BBQ. I ordered it, stopped at the dispensary, and then we picked up food and headed back home. 

We were sure in for a treat when we dug in to the food.

I didn't realize I had ordered fried yakimandu, but it doesn't quite matter, everyone reported them as delicious. 

I didn't have time to fuck around with figuring out what everyone actually wanted, so everyone got dolsot bibimbap. It's fine, they all loved it. 

Derek said the japchae was pretty good, but that my japchae is better. He may have said it's just because the egg I make is better, but I will still take better. 

The banchan was GREAT. The radish? SPECTACULAR. 

Ok so, in Chicago, Derek and I got this amazing kimchi pancake and I have been chasing the taste of it ever since. This kimchi pancake was damn fucking close to the one I got in Chicago, and I think the only thing that held it back was it was take out and not crispy. The taste was divinity. 

This veggie pancake was great, too. Very onion forward, but also so mellow. It tasted like spring. 

And then we all hung out for a bit and went to bed. 

It is June 3rd, I am still a day behind. I am about to leave for the camera store, then the botanical garden, and then who knows? My dad wanted and easy evening, so hopefully tonight I can get caught up. Our next day trip is to RMNP, with mixed success. 

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.