Friday, March 27, 2009
SBRT Day 15-17: Boulder, CO
I don’t know about you, but when I drive to the “Mile High City” of Denver, I have certain expectations. I expect there to be mountains, or at the very least hills. The reality, however, is just flat flat flat flat BAM! mountains. And the BAM doesn’t actually happen until the far side of Denver—apparently you get to the mile-high altitude very gradually throughout Kansas and the east side of Colorado. Weak.
Luckily, we are staying in Boulder, which is on the west side of Denver and a little more nestled into the foothills of the Rockies. Our host is our college friend Casey, who is working as an engineer and living with her aunt to save money. As we sit down to a few margaritas in the rooftop seating of a Mexican joint with a beautiful view of the mountains, she talks shop about dimensions of satellites and frustrations about thermodynamic thresholds. Steve and I are very impressed and have the all too familiar feeling that Industrial and Operations Engineers experience of not being real engineers. After dinner, she describes in impressive detail all the bars in the area and their strengths and weaknesses. She’s been keeping up her collegiate lifestyle well.
The next day Steve and I hit the Coors factory. I avoid the term “brewery” because to me a brewery is much less mechanical and much more experimental. Everything is industrialized, with mechanical assembly lines constantly outputting 30 packs and kegs at blazing speed. The free tour only takes us around about 2% of the gigantic campus of buildings, but it ended with 3 free beers. They know where our priorities lie. Afterward we meet Casey and a few of her Boulder friends for happy hour beer and tapas. They’re weird and fun, and they’re nerdy in ways that complement our nerdiness. When we figure we’ve offended the high class people around us with our crass and loud jokes, we head to Casey’s friend Scott’s apartment. His roommates are brewing beer, which is cool to watch, and we play drinking Chutes & Ladders. Why is it so great to bastardize all of our childhood activities by making drinking games out of them?
On our final day in Boulder we figure we should take advantage of the mountainous landscape and go on a hike. We decide to do the classic man thing of pretending that we’ve got experience and trying a tough hike, when in fact we each have more fingers than hiking experiences. We definitely feel the altitude—breathing gets tough before we even get into the foothills. Quickly we discover the strategy of taking frequent breaks to catch our breath and look at the view, and the hike is a great time from there on up. Afterward the park ranger tells us that we hiked about 1/3 of a mile towards the sun. We’re proud of ourselves. Back at Casey’s, we grill a few burgers and ears of corn while she bakes cookies. We hit the road with full bellies and two tupperware containers of deliciousness.
SBRT Day 13-15: St. Louis & Kansas City, MO
Since we did want to be like Kerouak in spirit but not so much in sleeping conditions, we immediately started contacting people between Charlotte and Kansas City asking if we could crash with them. We ended up staying with Steve’s dad’s poker buddy Andi, who is married with two kids living in St. Louis. In the morning Steve owned their trash talking 7 year old in a racing game and we headed off to the Big Dance.
The game was held at the Sprint Center in KC, which looks like a big reflective doughnut. Our ticket included two games, in the following order: 10 Maryland vs. 2 Memphis and 10 Michigan vs. 2 Oklahoma. For those of you unfamiliar with seeding, that means that Memphis and Oklahoma are big favorites to win. After Maryland got the crap beat out of it, it was our chance to beat the odds. A few Maize-clad ladies sat down in front of us, and Steve & I joined up with them to try to infiltrate the Michigan fan section in the lower level of the stadium. The ladies got to stay, we got kicked out. About 8 minutes into the game we tried again but again failed. Eventually we went back to our section that had a few Michigan fans, a few more Oklahoma fans, and a bunch of people that had stuck around from the Memphis game and didn’t really give a shit either way. We were loud. It was great. Since some of you may not have seen the game, I will painfully write out the words: we lost. Steve & I dejectedly drove to a hotel on the west side of town and looked on the bright side with a dip in the hotel hot tub.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
SBRT Day 11-13: Charlotte, NC
Charlotte is a beautiful city. It is clean, modern, young, and alive. This is the consensus that Steve and I come to as we wander around the downtown area before meeting his cousin John for dinner. We eat at an Irish pub (what? crazy!) called Blackfinn and learn about life after college a little farther down the road. Then we head to the apartment building of Steve’s friend Sara, where we’re going to crash. It has a workout room, a couple of lounges, a balcony with a beautiful cityscape view, and a pool! She tells secondhand stories of skinnydipping adventures in said pool, and I tell a firsthand one from a similar pool. I’m a story topper. Deal with it. Steve catches Sara up on tennis team gossip as I giggle at South Park and we call it a night.
The next day we spend watching college basketball in a couple bars: Ed’s Tavern first for its pool and multitude of TV’s, and Tavern By The Tracks for the Michigan game because it’s a Michigan bar. When we get there, the Michigan-ness is weakly represented by the decorations, moderately represented by the existing patronage, and strongly represented by our arrival. Our group easily doubles the Wolverine fandom in the bar, contributing about 30 maize and/or blue articles of clothing and 9 cheering, screaming, and beer-drinking mouths. And while we might not have been directly responsible, I like to think that we helped Michigan to its glorious victory over higher-seeded Clemson.
When we return to Sara’s, we decide to make our first Kerouakian long-distance lark: we’re going to the Round 2 Michigan game versus Oklahoma, in Kansas City. This will almost certainly disrupt our road trip plan, and we’ve discussed some possible options, but we agree with certainty that it’s worth it. So Kansas City, March Madness, and the greatest Michigan basketball season in 11 years (at least)—here we come. GO BLUE!!!
PS We forgot to get a picture in Charlotte, so when we met my friend Chelsee in Nashville for lunch, we headed over to the Baylor mansion to snap a quick pic, shown here.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
SBRT Day 9-11: Raleigh, NC
So I’ve got this tradition of writing about each place that we visited while we’re in the car on the way to the next place, and it seems to be going pretty well. But on this car trip from Raleigh to Charlotte, we’ve been listening to the new Adam Carolla podcast, and I can’t stop listening long enough to write anything of value. So here are the cliffs notes of Raleigh: Steve’s friend Brandon put us up, the first night we got drunk and told stories of bad decisions, the second night (St. Patty’s) we went to Brandon’s soccer game and drank rum and cokes then went to the bar with the team, where my favorite moment of this stop occurred: people were smoking in the men’s bathroom, so I bummed a smoke, then decided to give the guy one of our road trip custom shot glasses. So now this random dude in Raleigh has a shot glass with my face and Steve’s face printed on it.
The picture below is from the Duke campus, which we hit up on the way out of town. Here comes Charlotte, the former home of my favorite athlete of all time, Muggsy Bogues.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
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