waking up saturday morning i sort of knew there was going to be a lot of stuff happening today. sara had mentioned she wanted to go up to the mountains so i could finally stop asking "where're the mountains?", and that we were going to have dinner with her folks. but i didn't realize how much was really going to happen on saturday.

i remember waking up around 10 or so with my stomach literally churning, it took me a second or two to realize why. my stomach was still used to EST and over there it was noon and already i hadn't eaten anything.

grudgingly i woke up sara because i knew she hadn't gotten a lot of sleep during the night [i'd also like to note that during her sleep she twitches, and it freaks the hell out of me] but really, if i didn't wake up then i'd have a stomach ache all day and be in such a crappy mood i wouldn't be fun to hang around.

after a bit of shenanigans of finding stuff to wear, and getting all showered up we left and headed out to Sam's #3. of course i had never heard of this place since it was a local restaurant but the food was pretty good, and for 8 bucks you got a pretty damned big portion of food. after we had stuffed ourselves we headed out on the trip to the mountains.

now i'll preface the mountain portion of the story with the fact i've seen mountains over here. both the applachian and pocono mountain ranges, but really after today i finally understood why people from out west referred to them as nothing more than hills.

after driving for about an hour or so we finally started to get into the mountains, the roads winding along mountains that seemed to really spring out of nowhere. one moment the ground was pretty level and then bam, mountains. it was after only about 10 more minutes that i started to see snow on the peaks of the mountains, and that simple fact was so...freaky to me. i mean it's memorial day weekend, the start of summer, the start of immense heat and immense humidity, and here i was looking at frigging snow.

so we're driving up the side of this one mountain and sara pulls over, i think so i can take a picture cause it's honestly a breath-taking sight. the sun's out, there's a few clouds in the sky and everything is just..perfect. turns out it was that, and also because she didn't want to drive anymore. i get behind the wheel and start up the mountain and then down it again, all the time trying to find the perfect spot to stop and get some pictures. but honestly i was just amazed that here i am driving in a car in the mountains, with snow!

i keep driving, and driving, mostly because sara's now asleep and told me to keep driving until i see a sign for "rocky mountain state park." only i haven't seen any sort of sign in a super long time. then when i do see one it says nothing about rocky mountain state park, and then i realize that maybe it was my turn, since i haven't seen any other sign and i am supposed to turn. sara wakes up and we find out that yes, we are supposed to have turned.

eventually we get on the right road and get into the park [not after switching drivers also] and man, it was 15 friggin dollars to get in. i don't think any national park out here costs to get in, let alone 15 bucks.

anyway we start the drive up and only see a few deer as we're headed up the road to the top of the mountain [no i don't know what the name of it is, and yes i suck]. either way the scenery is gorgeous, i mean tree's everywhere, green grass, gigantic mountains, what more could you ask for?

all the way up the mountain i kept seeing more and more snow, i mean there were actually drifts next to the road there was so much snow. but by the time we go to the very top we were literally surrounded by it. there were at least 8 foot drifts alongside the road that had evidently just been carved into by a massive snow plow-ish thing.

when we did reach the true summit, i didn't talk much. mostly because here i am sitting in a car at 12 thousand feet that's winding it's way along the very tippy-top of a mountain, and i'm right next to the edge. the edge of what? oh just a massive fucking drop of doom. i told sara that i couldn't talk much because well, i was focusing on the dotted yellow line in the middle of the road and if i stopped doing that i might yak all over her car.

however i did manage to make it through the 10 minutes it took to go up over the peak and then down without yaking so it was all kosher.

and i almost forgot, before we got up into the park we had stopped at a lake to take pictures, the lake was gorgeous [as almost everything in colorado seemed to be] but it stands out for 2 reasons. 1] sara tried to help a little girl who was crying because her cousins were mean to her, but the girl was too cool to wawnt to hang out with us. and not more than 2 minutes after we talked to her, we spotted the girl careening around with the same cousins who were so mean to her. 2] we saw a moose. i mean a honking big moose. and it was super-close to us. maybe 5-10 feet away from me after i tried to get close to get a picture of it. [the damned thing turned his head as i was snapping a picture so the two pictures i have of it are of it's backside] now i've seen a lot of animals around here, but never have i seen a moose. and lemme tell you, moose are friggin big. they seem like horses on steroids almost.

ok so by now we've come down out of the mountain and are headed to "estes park" because it's apparently so beautiful and sara figured we could finally take some pictures of the two of us together [cause up until that point i didn't have a single picture of the two of us and i knew if i came back without any my mom would shoot me] there was only one problem, the estes park area was a zoo. there was a craft fair of some sort and then a ton more people, thanks to the ton of people a group of bikers basically blocked sara from getting into the park, or at least getting headed in the right way and so we ended up missing the whole thing.

and now we were headed on some weird road, and sara wasn't totally sure she knew how to get home. i'll skip the scene but we basically took a nice 2 hour back-country drive. which really was ok with me, i got a little nap in and got to see a lot more of the coloradian [is that a word?] back-country.

after we had our little expedition we met up with sara's family at a buffalo restaurant, or something like that. i think it was just called Buffalo because the farmers around it were buffalo farmers, but i could be mistaken. the point is the restaurant was pretty quaint and by the time sara and i got in everyone was there already.

dinner was good [i had an awesome prime rib] but well, i got ripped to shreds by her step-father during the course of it. sure i expected it to happen, but by the end of dinner i was a little annoyed with sara that she didn't really try to help me out with her step-father, instead giving him some more ammo in stuff to throw at me. she said afterwards that when she mentioned libby i could've mentioned her supplier "boyfriend", but really i can't do that. i can maybe do it to anyone else, but not the person who i love and care for. that and i'm sure if i had attempted to do that her step-dad would've somehow managed to turn it around to backfire on me. either way the rest of her family was nice. well i should say her mom was, since her sister was pissed at her fiancee and said maybe 5 words the entire dinner.

by the time we left dinner i was more than a little frayed and a bit tired. before we had gotten in dinner sara suggested after we eat we head up to one of the casinos that're in the mountains and have some fun. to be honest by the time we left dinner i was tired and not really feeling it, but i knew she wanted to go so i said i was up for it, knowing that it'd only take me a bit to get a second wind and have some fun.

i thought that the casino would be maybe 10 minutes away, but nope it was another 45 minutes away from the buffalo restaurant. now i have to also mention that the only time i've gone to a casino before was when i went with my mom to one out in nc or tennesee, and frankly it sucked. but then again we went in the middle of the day, and this time i was going with someone else who would sit and bet right alongside me and we'd have some fun.

so really i had gotten my second wind already and was ready to get bettin. if we could figure out where to get some money.

honestly it was the most confusing cluster-fuck i've ever seen. we went to one lady hoping we'd get chips there, only she gave us some card and we realized we couldn't use it to gamble with since well, we hadn't put any money on it. then we spent another 10 minutes walking from one end of the casino to another, still no luck. finally we find a lady who seems to be changing bills. i give her 60 bucks and ask for a ton of one's, then she looks at me like i'm a 7 headed alien. i laugh nervously and say i'll take 'em in 5's [as per her suggestion].

so now i have a ton of 5's in my posession and sara and i are still clueless as to what to do. eventually we head to one of the 25 cent machines, a poker-ish one that i can remember doing well on when i was in tenessee. we sit down and each plunk in a fiver, 2 minutes later i'm done with mine, i think i won a total of 2 games. sara on the other hand is winning hand over foot, she's really kicking some ass and having fun. but me i'm having about as much fun as throwing my money [or well her money actually] out the window and she can see it. eventually she stops playing to appease me and we find another machine. only everything seems to be for the big bucks, and i dunno what i want to play. we wander around for 5 minutes looking for any game that has 2 empty spots in it so we can both play and finally i come to some sort of game where i can see a lady winning a ton of something. there's a machine with one chair at it, and the one next to it has no chair and so i sit down. figuring that sara'll go steal a chair from down the row since there was an empty chair there. only she doesn't, but i've already put my money in so i give the game a whirl.

i really have no idea what i'm doing, i just keep hitting 'spin again' and noticing that every other spin or so i seem to win, sometimes it's only 6 or 12, but then i win a big one and am finally to starting to enjoy it. i notice that sara wants to go back to her poker machine so i cash out after winning some more. turns out i win about 4 bucks since i was only playing on the nickel machines.

by this point we have a sizeable amount of coinage in a cup so we head to a machine that changes it into bills. after that's done we head back to the same row of nickel slots i was on and there happens to be two machines empty near the end. so we both sit down and get to playing. i'm not winning like i was on my other machine but i'm not doing bad. sara has as little of a clue of how to play the game as i do but she's doing pretty well too. once or twice she even hits the 'bonus' game and i picked the fat guy to get the biggest fish when she asked me [should've gone with the black guy] but basically we were getting into having some serious fun with the whole gamblin thing.

10 minutes or so pass and i'm ahead by a lot so i cash out, it takes my money at least 2 minutes to totally come out since well, it's coming out in nickels and there's some 500 nickels i had to collect [there might've been more i forget] but sara's still kicking ass in her game. i can't remember how but somehow i convinced her that we should cash out so that we can use our winnings to keep playing [i believe we were running out of our original batch of fivers] so we cash in our change and come back to our machines, only to see some old guy with a knee-brace sitting next to a woman in a wheel-chair. and sara's furious because why is this guy sitting at her lucky machine, why isn't he playing and so on. and she had a point. i mean really who comes to a casino and doesn't gamble?

so we take a walk around the casino looking for some other nickel slots to play, and we walk some more, but we keep coming back to the same guy sitting at sara's machine, which in turn makes her more annoyed at the man. eventually i say i wanna go try out the plinko game [as in the price is right, yea be jealous] because well i'm a plinko whore, i loved watching that game on tv as a kid. i was so enraptured with it for some reason. so sara and i both sit down and try to play, it too is as confusing as the others but we plug along. in a minute sara's already through her 5 bucks and gets annoyed with it. "i'm going to go back to my machine, or that row and see if i can't win some more" i say okay, give her a kiss and wish her luck, but i wanted to stay there because i liked the game and well it has a super comfy seat.

soon i'm doing ok, and i notice a lady next to me having an attendant make her sign something, so i look over at her screen and notice that she's just won 1230, which roughly translates to 610 bucks. needless to say the machine doesn't pay out that much so i'm guessing the attendant was going to get her her money. i take that as a sign and keep playing, soon i'm out of money but i really like the game and i don't want to put in the last mutual 20 so i take out my own money and plunk in a 20, i figure if i'm going to lose it i might as well lose my own money.

i start off not too shabby, but i still haven't gotten to play any damned plinko, next thing i know i hit the jackpot, so to speak. i get to do the showcase showdown, complete with spinning wheel [that was actually a minature one mounted above the machine, it was kinda cool] and lo and behold i won [i actually nailed it, you had to get between 55 and 100, and i got a 95] basically the showcase showdown was a way to earn a lot of extra money, and i did. 410 extra infact. so after i nearly doubled my money i kept playing for a bit but noticed my luck had pretty much ran out, so i cashed out about when i had 700 [or 30 bucks] now all i had to do was find sara.

where else would she be but at her lucky machine, so i go over to her with an almost completetly full bucket of coins and a shit-eating grin on my face. she congratulates me and says that she's not doing as good as she was before, claims it was the fat guy taking her seat who fucked up her luck [and he probably did] i sat down next to her and tried to play some more but by this point it was maybe 10 or 11 at night and we were clearly both tired beyond belief. so she cashed out and we got out coins changed into bills and decided to leave. all in all we started out with 60 bucks [that was sara's] and ended up with a decent winning of 20 bucks or so. when i got all the bills i took back my 20 i had used to play the price is right game, and gave the rest to her, since really it was her money she had gotten it from her bank account not i.

the drive home was pretty uneventful except for the fact it took a long time and we were both about to pass out. i told her numerous times if she needed me to drive i would because i could tell i was a bit more alert than she was. she lasted until the outskirts of denver and then finally got off on an exit and we did a chineese fire-drill to switch because she was bordering on exhaustion.

i managed to get us home half decently and by the time we got into the apartment all we cared about was getting out of our clothes and passing the fuck out. which we did, in a hearbeat.

wow if you really read all that, you deserve some sort of medal. i can't believe i even typed it up. either way i hope someone enjoys it.

scud