January 13, 2006: Crested Butte – Denver – Boston – Nashua.
In the morning we woke up unbelievably early (7 AM), packed the rest of our belongings, checked out of the hotel, hopped on the car and headed to Denver. We stopped in the town to take one last picture of the mountain:
The drive to Denver was much easier than the Friday night ordeal on the way to Crested Butte a week earlier. It's interesting that when we were moving from California to New England in 2003, Colorado looked to me very different from Southern California. Now that I visited both Southern California and Colorado from New England in the span of two months, they looked vastly similar. Kind of funny how my perception has changed in less than three years...
I have never really been in Denver, but this was the third time I drove through it, each time taking a slightly different route. Each time I drive through it, I am wondering if its proximity to great skiing is the only reason people live there. I'm not trying to pick on Denver here: it took me a couple years of working in downtown Boston before I was finally able to appreciate Boston and its culture, and it took me to leave LA and come back there before I finally started getting why not everybody is disgusted by it. That said, both Boston and LA have a distinct character: you wouldn't confuse either of them with anything else the moment you first see them (that applies to all other great cities I have been to: Barcelona, Amsterdam, Prague, New York, Chicago, Moscow). Denver, however, to me looks like a random town like many others between the Rockies and the East Coast. I am almost sure I am missing something. Somebody who gets Denver, please enlighten me!
When we got to the rental car return facility at the airport, a Friday 13-ish surprise hit us. The guy found a "big dent and a hole" in our bumper:
Why the dude who was checking the car made a big deal out of it, is beyond me. I know that some people treat cars religiously, but whatever interest in or respect for cars I had evaporated the moment I first got some decent speed on skis. Treating a freaking dent in the bumper of a rental Chevy Impala beyond the monetary value of the said dent while standing in plain view of snow-capped Rocky Mountains to me is a perversion.
It was also exacerbated by the fact that we couldn't imagine where we could get the dent: we would probably feel it if we hit anything while driving, and the car was parked with bumper facing a big snowpile for the most part of our stay in Crested Butte. A relevant piece of advice I have for myself in the future is this: photograph the rental car the moment you first see it and also a minute before returning it to the rental facility. You would then know if the schmuck is seriously upset (and then you can ignore him and proceed to whoever looks to profit from the event so that you can pay them) or if he is full of it (in which case you can let lawyers deal with it).
Whatever the case, after wasting about half an hour dealing with Payless stuff, we proceeded to the airport. If this turns out to cost us more than the new bumber on a Chevy Impala, I will write about it here.
The good thing was, that was the first and the last time Friday the 13th reminded us about itself. We still arrived at the airport on time, had a couple beers, and proceeded to the plane. While I'm on that, there is one thing about the Denver airport that still buffles me up until this very moment. Why do they have one building for check-ins, luggage, security and then a separate building with gates (I'm not sure about the two being in separate physical buildings, but you do have to take a train to get from one to the other)? I'm not ready to dismiss this as a poor engineering decision (it didn't really cause us any inconvenience), but I still see no reason for doing it this way. Denver airport is not Logan or Orange County: it stands pretty much in an open desert, so lack of space is unlikely the motivation. Does that speed up check-ins or security checks? Does that somehow reduce the operating costs? Is there something specific about the area geology that forced them do it this way? An explanation would make for a wonderful reading on the train to/from the gates.
The flight to Boston with stopover in Milwaukee was fairly uneventful, except we managed — for the first time ever! — to tie a game of suicide chess with my PowerBook. While I'm on that, I really want to recommend Midwest Airlines to anybody considering flying with them. First time I flew Midwest, and it stands above all other airlines I had experience with for the price: widely-spaced leather seats with foldable pillows on all of the planes, great service, decent coffee and freshly baked cookies :-)
Boston met us with something in between light rain and heavy fog. The drive up I-93, I-95 and Route 3 was refreshing after Denver (driving up I-93 North in Boston being "refreshing" sounds weird, I know). The weather, however, reminds me of the quality of skiing — or lack thereof — that we are back to...