Day Thirty-Six: Gonna have ourselves a time

Day Thirty-Six started out cool and misty in St. Louis. Mike was angelic and woke up first, so I could steal an extra few minutes cuddled under the covers, dreaming of mornings spent sleeping late in our own bed, with suitcases stored away in the garage and both cars parked outside our apartment. I'll admit I've taken to drooling over Google Streetview, which has extended to our street. But I digress. The point is, we woke up this morning in St. Louis. As I type this now, we're in the basement of the lovely Cassie B.'s home in Denver, CO. Over twelve hours of driving, and we're now just a time zone away from good ol California.

If you're wondering what it's like to drive from St. Louis to Denver, let me just say this: it's long. It's really long. About a half hour after pulling off the curb in front of Holly's house Mike looked at me and said, "Well, I guess we'd better have a stimulating conversation." We tried it for a while, with me asking "If you could choose..." and "What one thing..." questions that quickly (i.e. in an hour) disintegrated into silliness as we discussed which historical defensive line would have the best chance of sacking Batman. Acknowledging, of course, that no one would actually be able to. Two hours down, ten to go.

The crawl across Kansas and Missouri was just like you've heard. Flat, flat lands with no end in sight. Sometimes place names were amusing, but there just were too few places. We listened to the last 3 hours of The Great Gatsby and reminisced about great English teachers we'd had. Denver was only a half page of the atlas away, but it's those last three hundred miles that kill you. And, when an early evening haze is obscuring the Rockies, you begin to doubt whether Denver wasn't all just an elaborate hoax, whether there's any end at all to the journey.

There was, and it was in the form of a ridiculously awesome dinner at Casa Bonita, which is just as amazing as Cartman made it out to be. A man dressed as a gorilla juggled and pushed a garishly dressed woman off a cliff into a pool below. There was a piñata. There was a fire diver. All of this cleverly distracted from the way below mediocre Mexican food (think nacho cheese enchilada). Our spirits lifted, we drove to Cassie's house in the ever-so-familiar sounding suburb called "Lakewood."

Cassie is, though I hadn't seen her since ninth grade, just as great as I'd remembered her to be. We got to meet her lovely fiance, then set up shop in her basement, where we watched the basketball game and trundled to an early sleep with a gorgeous kitty snuggled between us. Ah. I could get used to this.

We listened to: The Great Gatsby, The Pride is Back (David Cross), The Clarence Greenwood Recordings (Citizen Cope), Songs from an American Movie, pt. 1 (Everclear), and a roving mariachi band singing a birthday song to at least a third of the hundreds of tables at the Beautiful House.

Mystery words: "The Cathedral of the Plains"

Mike is more daily than I: astoriedyear.blogspot.com