La Quinta: Spanish for “next to Denny’s”

Ok!  I’m home.  Now it’s storytime so gather ’round, chilluns!  We left on Friday with the intent to drive all the way to Colorado Springs that day so we wouldn’t have to stop anywhere else and get a hotel room. We ended up finding a couchsurfer there named Fei and I’ll talk about her in a sec.

Before we even left we went back to my house to pick up some things like my acoustic bass, Jeffe. Unfortunately Joey and Joe didn’t know the rules that the cats stay outside on the porch during the day while we’re gone so they can’t cause mischeif. So the cats ended up getting in and when we tried to get Mick outside he freaked out and turned into a feline blender and clawed and bit both me and Joe. At that point I was like "ok let’s just leave the cats inside for one day because they’re way too freaked out to lure out now." and so we got disinfected and bandaided, took pictures of the battle damage, got my stuff and left.

So on the way up we got turned around in Fort Worth because we missed the turn where 287 turns into "main street" and so we backtracked almost half an hour, but we bought a nice atlas there that saved our patooties. Also it was next to a cingular store and Joey bought a new charger for his phone because his broke just as we were leaving.

We drove up through Amarillo, and now we know better but we decided to take a direct route through Oklahoma to get to Colorado Springs. We were in Oklahoma for a grant total of 30 minutes going through the pan handle and not 5 miles from the border Joey gets pulled over for going 77 in a 65. Not like they had any SPEED LIMIT signs in Oklahoma. We spent the last 10 minutes before the ticket trying to figure out how fast we were supposed to be going, and since it was 70 in Texas we assumed it would be the same. We also saw a dinosaur corssing sign in Oklahoma. That was the highlight of our time there.

We got to Colorado Springs around 1AM mountain time (we would have been there sooner if we hadn’t gotten pulled over and we had chosen a road that wasn’t being worked on. that shit cost us like an hour and a half. 2 hours sooner if we had no trouble getting there. We even made sandwiches in the car, and Joe peed in a bottle. Would have been like 14 hours but it took 16. We met our couchsurfer host Fei in Colorado Springs at like 1AM at a bar downtown because she was up partying with her roommate Kjersti.

Fei is a cute Chinese girl from San Fransisco and Kjersti’s parents are Swedish. Oh and Kjersti’s last name is Ellison. They had met some drunk dude at the bar that looked like Kevin Federline and acted like Fabio. I called him K-Fraud. he was pretty gross. They dropped him off at his house but he was so drunk he left his keys in their car and they didn’t find them until the next morning. It was hilarious. Colorado Springs was pretty groovy. We followed them back and watched Donnie Darko (first time I actually saw the movie) and fell asleep promptly afterwards. For some reason I always thought it had Johnny Depp in it. Apparently it doesn’t. It has Jake Gyllenhaal in it.

Anyway. We woke up at the crack of 11 and walked down to this groovy little Kerby Lane type place up in CS and I had the Huevos Rancheros which were killer. Apparently Colorado is obsessed with green chilies. It had it’s own fucking section on the menu. Anyway we tlaked with Fei and Kjersti and found out how awesome they are and decided to cancel one day of our 2 day hotel reservation to stay with them another night. Saved us some money too. We went to this Jermaine Rogers exhibit (he does concert posters for like Ween and Weezer and NIN and stuff) and then we went swimming and had seedless watermellon.

After the swimming and watermellon we went to Garden of The Gods and I took lots of awesome pictures including "The Mexican in the bush" "penis rock" and a great shot of Pike’s Peak. And Fei actually has 2 roommates, but one is almost never there because she stays with her boyfriend in Manitou Springs which is right down the road. And after that we went over to her roommate’s boyfriend’s house in Manitou and hung out with them. He’s like this stoner hippie guy that’s all into rock climbing and rafting. We also met this old fisherman Jim who told us all these awesome stories about fishing in Alaska.

He would tell us about how his boat would capsize is 60 foot swells and how he was the only survivor and he had been in the water for 17 hours and he caught hypothermia and nearly died. and then there was a time his boat flipped and some whales tried to push him and his other friend towards the shore, because they knew they didn’t belong in the water and they wanted to save them. I forget where he was but it was in a fishing town in Alaska and they had the names of about 300 people who had died fishing just from that town on a wall and he was looking at it reading the names and he just broke down crying because he’d known personally about 180 of them.

And towns in Alaska are friggin small. 300 people dead is a whole lot. He was a cool guy. He was drinking and telling us stories. It was great. And Luke, the boyfriend was talking to Joey and after asking him if he wanted some weed he said "hey I got this friend that lives in Purgatory out near Durago and he’s got some space for you guys to stay if you’re going to Albuquerque. Let me call him up and tell him you’re coming." and gets his friend Larry on the phone and Larry’s like "yeah man, any friend of yours is a friend of mine." and so we got another place to stay even though it wasn’t with someone from couchsurfing.com

That was cool and we had bratwurst and hamburgers and mojitos, then we went to this bar where this old hippie jam band was playing and danced for the next 2 hours. And the high altitude kinda caught up with me there and I did throw up once :X but my highly pressurized Texan stomach could not be contained by the light mountain air. It was only once. I wasn’t sick or anything, just drank my amber ale too fast. I drink like that all the time down here and I’m always fine. I just need to remember to take it easy in the mountains. at 7000 feet alcohol does a number on you.

We stayed that extra night and when we woke up, we jammed out for Fei and Kjersti on our accoustic instruments. Then we headed out to Denver and stayed at a La Quinta. The service was pretty awful because the free wifi server was down half the night and everyone kept calling and complaining and the room was… well, a La Quinta room. We decided that La Quinta is actually Spanish for "next to Denny’s"

(To be continued on the next entry) ————–>