Rock And Roll (Not The Good Kind)

Last weekend I went to Montrose and while it wasn't a mont of roses it was a bed! (Put down the doob, Greg.)

Sara A. took me under her wing and showed me the sights outside her wing.

"Okay, you yodel first, and then I'll join you..." *sneaks away*

Everything was great, but as we walked around the downtown metropolitan area I felt that something was missing.

I looked around. "So, uh, are they hiding it, or what?"

"Hiding what?"

"The Charles M. Schulz Museum," I said, panic rising in my voice. "It's gotta be around here somewhere!"

After I was informed that not every town in America has a Charles M. Schulz Museum (wtf), we stopped at my favorite place.

Sara  introduced me to the staff, and then introduced me to the bookdrop.

"Okay," she said. "Get crackin', library boy."

"Yes'm!"

Two and half hours later we resumed our tour. Along the way we spotted a very familiar looking vehicle.

"Wow! This thing really gets around!"

Still not enough people peeing out there, people...

Then we went down to Ouray, also known as Fuckton, and saw the giant steeple memorial built in honor of my parents.

Plaques For Sale!!

We took a dip in the hot springs where I broke out my Star War swim gear. It's a truth universally acknowledged that when you have wookiees on your crotch you know you're having a good day (Ben Franklin, I think).

In Telluride Sara and I rode the gondola high over Tom Cruise's house...

"There it is! Start spittin'!"

and made the acquaintance of two young girls in our gondola who were very friendly and very good at sales--Sara wound up buying a raffle ticket that had something to do with yoga balls, Indonesia and Thomas Pynchon. I was very frightened.

Despite the lack of Schulz, I had a great time. I bid adieu to the Hampton Inn and the heap of tires outside my window (currently not on fire), and jumped on I-70 to make it back to Denver in time for the Broncos Super Bowl parade. 

But there was a fly in my ointment. Refrigerator-sized flies. In Glenwood I was told to get off the highway because of a rockslide. 

Flummoxed, I drove aimlessly thinking there was bound to be some sort of detour set up, uh, somewhere? But there was nothing. I drove down to Aspen in the hopes that there was a clever way of getting back to I-70 and to Denver where the parade was no doubt going on without me.

But Independence Pass was closed (a pass I didn't know existed until then), and I am not clever. I circled back to Aspen, feeling a bit panicked. What if Malik Jackson didn't see me waving at him?? I needed to stop and look up where I was on my phone, but Goldie Hawn and her ilk had taken up all the parking spots. So I did what only every good American would do, which was take out my mom's handicapped placard and park in a handicap space. 

As I got out to find a place to pee, I felt self-conscious about being in a handicapped space so I started to sort of limp slightly... (Cue Curb theme.)

I am much too soft for this mountaineering stuff. I mean, why does there have to be mountains?? 

Eventually I got a hotel room in Basalt and learned there was a loong route through Rifle to Craig to Steamboat to Wolcott to get around the rockslide, taking a total of four hours. It was the kind of reacharound a fella gets in the county lockup (rumor has it). But there was no other way. So the next day I took a delightful tour of northern Colorado, and wound up visiting Meeker and Hayden (go Tigers!!) and Gonorrhea Mesa--so along with Ouray and Montrose and Telluride and Basalt and Frisco I saw basically every goddamn mountain town in all of Colorado. And not a Schulz museum in any of them! When is Obama going to do something about it??

Thanks to Sara A. and Nick and Eva for the good non-Schulzy times!! 

The Beauty and the Dork