Home of John Elway, Roy, and Sarah

My birthdays have had a common element. They've all been terrible. I've never felt that age is setting in or that life has passed me by. The matter of fact is quite the contrary. I've always felt that I've had more years than my driver's license would prove. Birthdays have just been a let-down. This one was different. Let's get to the tough part before the celebration.

After our excursion in Gillette we hustled on down to Denver where a slice of paradise awaited. A brief 6-hour drive brought us to welcome turf; albeit an exercise in maneuverability. I didn't quite know what to expect when passing the off ramp into Denver and was little comforted by the drive through what appeared to be some sort of idealistic Mexican ghetto in which my soon-to-be-hosts lived. Pulling up on the side of the front curb gave little comfort as the bus's chassis ebbed and ached with guttural sounds seemingly sourced from some nether region of the coach. Something was certainly wrong but we were only a few blocks from our destination.

I'll touch upon the resolution of those particular mechanical failures in another post.

After the regular bout of people shouting ambiguous directions, I somehow found my way into the back yard of my friends' ghetto utopia. Roy and Sarah have a lush back yard reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. It's all fenced in and protected from the outside world. The bus looked like an elephant hiding in a petting zoo, but there was a degree of safety that made it seem as if no wrong could be done.

My sob-story of birthdays past worked wonders on Sarah and she made arrangements for a get-together to celebrate. There were some people I didn't know and it was nice to have the foreign company but the jewel of the night was the arrival of my close friend Jason Nagy. He made a 22 hour drive from Oregon and pulled up at the crack of 9 o-clock. That was the best present I could've gotten.

He just quit his job and had a few days to kick around, so we headed off to Utah in search of adventure. We got it. With our sights set on Moab, we packed up our gear and rolled out in his Honda Civic. Utah might as well be another planet. There's no way to photograph the landscape in a way that might give the impression of scale. We climbed some rocks, kayaked the Colorado (paddling hard for a bit, then having a couple beers, then repeating the process), fell silent at the natural wonders, had some bbq's, etc.

In the meantime.. Des and Wes were heading off to Gillette (again) in a rental car to *ahem* make money for the return trip to Columbus. Little did I know that they'd be waiting for me on the bus a week later with no money, no game, and tales of hardship. Son of a bitch.