Honeymoon Days 2-3: Atlanta to Boulder

day 2

Days two and three were filled with hours and hours and hours in the car, as we made our way from one cousin's house to the next. Thursday was a cloudy fourteen-hour day, filled with photographs of the storied rivers of America shot through an increasingly dirty windshield.

the Tennessee River

the Ohio River

the Mississippi River

the Missouri River

While each of them was worthy of story and song back in the 19th century, it saddened me to know that these rivers have lost much of their cultural significance with the advent of the locomotive and automobile. Nowadays it seem people only mention rivers with regard to what is flooding where, but once upon a time, each of the above were vital to the establishment of great American cities like:

Nashville

St. Louis

I suppose I have a certain nostalgia for these times because they represent a certain idea of America that always existed more in theory than in practice. Judging from the billboards in MIssouri, I'm not the only one who suffers from this affliction.

Somewhere along the way I gave into my annual craving for Church's Chicken jalepeño bombers, which I first encountered years ago under rather sordid circumstances. They have long since disappeared from my diet, but I decided to indulge once more.

beard day 7

Moments after this picture was taken, however, I came to the disturbing, undeniable realization that they probably don't keep an extra vat of boiling grease at chicken just for the jalepeño bombers, which meant that what I was eating was undoubtedly contaminated with tiny specks of deep fried chicken. Suffice to say, I've said goodbye to yet another of my cherished vices.

We spent night two in Lawrence,, which is the hippest place in all of Kansas. Like a nincompoop, though, I forgot the camera in the hotel room, and was therefore unable to take pictures of either the delicious food at Zen Zero:

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or the beers we didn't drink at a pub called The Bourgeois Pig:

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Vital Statistics: Day 2

Miles: 857
States: 6
Departure time: 5:35 am EDT
Arrival time: 6:24 pm CDT
Total travel time: 13 hours, 49 minutes

Average speed: 62mph

day 3

Day three was spent trying to get through Kansas, which is both dismal and interesting for the same reason: it is never a destination, merely a passage from one end of the country to the other. No one (who isn't from there) wants to be there, and the most convincing proof of this is that even its namesake, Kansas City, chooses to live in Missouri.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that my yin continued reading Tina Fey's hilarious book Bossypants aloud as we drove, which made the prairies and high plains zip by far more quickly than if we had been forced to listen to the staticky religious rebel-rousers that populate the nether regions of the FM dial whenever NPR is unavailable. One cool thing we saw was a giant wind farm:

that sat direct across the road from this relic:

alternative energy situational irony at its best

Finally we crossed into Colorado, and within a couple of hours, we were able to make out the Rockies on the horizon:

I wondered to myself how the first European settlers must have felt seeing this for the first time. It must have been an overwhelming sense of exhilaration, knowing that the monotonous plains and prairies did come to an end, followed by terror – how in the hell are we going to get this wagon across that thing?

At this point excitement took over, and before we knew it we were looking at Denver's impressive skyline dwarfed by the mountains.

the difference puts things in perspective

Denver holds a dear and contested place in my psychic geography, but I will have to address that at a later time because we never entered the heart of the city, choosing instead to loop around on I-270. Perhaps this was little more than cleverly rationalized repression, but mainly it was because one doesn't need to go through Denver to get to Boulder.

Upon arrival, we went for a hike first thing. Our hosts live mere minutes from trail heads, and we took the opportunity to stretch our muscles and get our first real look at the city. With a few days in one place, our honeymoon feels like it's truly began. This picture says it all:

my yin, with Boulder in the background

Vital Statistics: Day 3

Miles: 580
States: 2
Departure time: 6:13 am CDT
Arrival time: 2:02 pm MDT
Total travel time: 8 hours, 49 minutes

Average speed: 66mph