John Denver Is NOT Full Of Shit

After driving all day on Saturday through Kansas (and crashing a mere 25 miles from the border) we woke up Sunday with a fresh resolve. We were finally going to make it to the mountains today.

We rolled into Denver around 10am on a Sunday morning, definitely not the most interesting time to visit a city. We walked around for a few hours but didn't really see much. It's a very clean city, and there seems to be a lot of cool stuff to do, but again, it was Sunday morning, and the place was basically dead. Rather than stay and wait for something to happen, we hopped back in the saddle and continued west on I-70, into the mountains.

We drove through several towns and passed about 6 million ski areas, checking out the gorgeous Rocky Mountains and finally seeing some significant amounts of snow. Sunday afternoon, after checking out a few of the smaller towns in the area, we stopped in a town called Frisco. We found a cheap motel, dropped off our stuff and went back out to explore.

Almost all of the small towns up here look more or less the same, with a single main street that looks almost exactly like what you'd expect the main street in a Western town to look like, only modernized. Some are larger or smaller, and some are more or less focused on the actual skiing side of things. Frisco, for example, had a lot of small ski chalets, but not as many Western storefronts.

For a real mining/cowboy town experience, check out Idaho Springs or Georgetown. These are much smaller towns that look like they really haven't changed much since the gold rush (which is celebrating its 150th anniversary next year).

We had originally planned to drive on to Wyoming and possibly Montana before settling down, but the proximity of dozens of great ski mountains, the larger towns that would provide jobs, and our own exhaustion with the road led us to decide to stay here in Colorado. I'm writing this now on Saturday, and we've spent the entire week looking around for jobs and apartments. We're currently waiting to hear from one apartment in Frisco, or else we will head back down the mountain to an inn in Idaho Springs where they've offered to let us pay by the month.

As far as the job search goes, it's looking like I might end up as a pizza delivery guy, or, with luck, a rental shop salesman. I'd love to work in a ski shop or something, just to hang out with like-minded people (and get Lisa some discounts on equipment!). Lisa and I have been talking about how we'd really be willing to do just about anything, and probably have fun doing it. All of the stores around here are locally owned, so it's a much more laid back experience. Of course, if we run out of options, there's always Target!

That's it for now. We've seen a lot of different apartments and applied for a bunch of different jobs, and maybe later I'll relay some of the more interesting experiences we had. For now we're just kind of in a holding pattern, waiting to see if we can afford to live here and what not.

More updates as events warrant. I think once we get settled this may turn into a ski mountain review blog, so be forewarned.