Wednesday morning we got up and grabbed breakfast on the hill - the neighborhood next to University of Colorado. We saw a number of interesting characters, and sat next to a guy on his cell phone who may be related to Earl Hickey and who used the term "bad karma" at least a half dozen times in his conversation. After a walk through campus and a short visit with Robert Frost, we went up to Rocky National Park and spent the day driving the length of the park and going for short side trips. We saw elk three different times, and a number of different animals that resembled chipmunks and or squirrels. We seemed to find ourselves stopping at the scenic overlooks with a group from Oklahoma several times, and at one point one of them commented that one of the squirrel-like animals resembled a "show pig with a longer tail"... uh, yep...

We actually passed some snowfall after we passed the peak of the Trail Ridge road, which at over 12,000 feet, is the highest paved road in the Lower 48. We were feeling it on some of the side trips, too, and found ourselves pretty breathless at times.

We ended the day at our campground just outside of Grand Lake. After dinner, we headed into town to have a beer at a local bar. We definitely got more than we bargained for.

"Hennessy"

Upon sitting on a bar stool, we began an extremely long conversation with someone that the bartender later referred to as "a local with a need to tell his life story." Needless to say the conversation was very one-sided, and for once, I wasn't the one running his mouth the whole night. There isn't space here to cover all of his rambling pointers, but I'll cover a few of the highlights:

• Despite looking like anything but, he referred to himself as a hippie more than a dozen times
• Hennessy was from Peoria, and this connection gave him all the material he needed for the night. In two stories that were (to him) somehow connected, his uncle who wrote for the Trib, got a full-page obit in the Trib when he died, and his grandfather "received checks from the city for 50 years" which somehow caused his uncle to serve time at Joliet at some point in his life.
• Leaving Peoria, was, at alternate points in the night, the "best move he ever made" and the "worst decision he ever made"
• Hennessy is a "lifelong bachelor" and repeatedly referred to us as "you lovebirds" and most of his stories from his youth -- mostly around 1972, involved various "broads" with which he had various highjinks, including nearly drowning after taking a 16 ft. boat out on Lake Powell in high swells.
• He did have some good advice buried in the jumble of words, foremost among them to "take an extra gallon of water" on the drive to Moab "just for laughs"
• One girl he dated from Glencoe who was the heir to the Ferraro Candy (?) fortune apparently ran off with the Bahai Temple folks
• At perhaps the only lull in the conversation, he blurted out "do you guys smoke weed?" and followed that up with, as he hoisted perhaps his eleventh whiskey of the evening "Weed is probably the only thing that kept me from being an alcoholic"
• His job in town was apparently managing a non-operational motel owned by a "limey b******" who was currently living in Europe, on the outskirts of the downtown. At least three times he asked me if I wanted some work as a roofer, and he offered up room #1 for our use if we didn't have any place to stay, which boasted the "best shower in the county." Despite the bartender's "stamp of approval" we were not about to stay in this oddball's closed-down, motel, despite the map of its location that he drew on a cocktail napkin, and his repeated urgings that it was really no trouble and we should take him up on his offer

-Andrew