I’m Talking About a Little Place Called Assssspen

Once in awhile I like to post about something that I think is only going to be funny to me and maybe a few select people.

This is one of those times.

I like to blog about my vacations, not because I think other people will think they are interesting, but because it sort of preserves the memory for me in a way that a photograph can’t. Pictures are a great visual but they don’t remind of you the little things on the trip that actually made it the great holiday that it was.

Plus I like to think that someday, when I’m sixty years old and blogging away at why I think prune juice is a better natural laxative than oat bran or something like that, I can dig into the archives and remember back to that one glorious weekend back in Aspen, where the beer flowed like wine and beautiful women flocked instinctively like the salmon of Capistrano.

The first thing you should know about Aspen, Colorado, is that it is literally impossible to NOT quote Dumb & Dumber while traveling to said town. Getting to Denver was easy enough but I dare you to not comment “I thought the Rocky Mountains would be a little rockier than this” while traveling the route along I-70. It can’t be done.

FYI – Dumb & Dumber was actually filmed in Breckenridge, Colorado. Many Aspenites commented on this fact, usually in a visibly annoyed manner. I got the feeling that the Aspen locals are not entirely impressed with Harry and Lloyd quoting tourists twelve years after the debut of this classic comedy.

We spent Thursday night partying in Denver, with the intention of making an early start to Aspen on Friday morning. Unbeknownst to us, we would be halted the next day by 100 mph winds causing 0% visibility beyond the Eisenhower tunnel, two hours into our journey.

That’s what’s weird about the Rocky Mountains; one second it’s crystal clear blue skies and two seconds later you’re stuck in a Class III Kill Storm.

Undeterred, we drove down to Colorado Springs and then west again to bypass the storm since the radio reported that I-70 would be closed until Saturday morning. All in all we added an additional five hours on top of the four hour trip it would have been regularly. What’s funny about that is that I-70 eventually did open up again on Friday night, so had we waited the storm out in Denver, we effectively would have arrived in Aspen about the same time without the extra five hours sitting in a car.

We justified our decision by claiming that we conquered that little bastard I like to call uncertainty. Who knew I-70 would open up again? Onward ho!


I realize this scene looks like it was taken directly from a Kazakhstanian Disco but I assure you, the rest of the weekend wasn’t NEARLY as homoerotic.

2/25/07

Anxious to check out the local scene, we quickly unpacked our things and headed downtown. The strange thing about Aspen is that it represents a small microcosm of a major metropolitan area. What I mean by this is that instead of having a few bars and restaurants like a typical ski town, Aspen contains its own Rodeo Drive complete with a night clubs and martini bars.

Not bad for a voting population of 6,000 people.

Anyways, having no one to plug us into the social pipeline, we decided to put out the vibe at the nearest watering hole that we could find. Luckily, we befriended some…well, I guess you call them hippies, but they weren’t like Madison hippies, more like ski bummish hippies. We had a fun time partying with them and they helped us show us the ropes around town.

The next day, we hit the up the Aspen Highlands, which was one gnarly hill to board. Gnarly is a very peculiar word that sort of evolved over the course of the weekend. At first gnarly was used mockingly to make fun of the locals.

“We’ll hit that wicked pow pow, br’a, it’s gonna be gnarly.”

As the afternoon went on, we stopped mocking gnarly and eventually accepted the word into our vocabulary, realizing the adjective has a tremendous amount of range. By the end of the trip, we turned gnarly into a noun, no small feat. In fact, one of the best quotes I heard over the weekend was Pete pointing at a jump from the chairlift and commenting in deadpan delivery:

“I think on this next run I’m going to grab some gnar off that headwall.”

Nice work, Pete.

Saturday night was more of the same with the exception of starting out at the local chapter of the Elk’s Club. The only reason I mention this is that Pete number 2 was using this as a pick-up line that night, which I’m pretty sure no one cared about. It was a worth a shot though.

Sunday was a great day. After another gorgeous day of boarding at AJAX, a rocking out session of Tegan & Sara, and a fabulous meal at the Aspen McDonalds, where we had everyone within an earshot in hysterics over an intense debate on the merits of the McRib, we decided to check out a thrift store in town where we got the following artifacts from around 1983.

I think the picture explains it all.



Rollerskate, Participate, Negotiate. These are the good times.

One more story from this trip, I promise.

So we decided to go out that night wearing these jackets, hoping a great story would emerge from the ridiculousness of the situation. As soon as we got out of our Taxi Sunday, we were immediately invited to have a drink with this 30-ish to 40-ish year old woman who was one of Aspen’s elite.

She eventually called up her entourage, who’s combined net worth is a figure so high that my financial calculator does not recognize it, where we ended up at the Caribou Club, Aspen’s most expensive private club in town. Apparently, Tommy Lee was there the night before. That was the closest I got to a celebrity sighting. But it was still pretty cool. Cody and I started sweating about the bar tab but thankfully the rich broads picked it up. So free drinks, too! The only thing I paid for was a round of coat checks, which set me back 15 bones. Not bad for a night hob-knobbing with Aspen’s elite.

I won’t get into the details about the remainder of the night, but let’s just say one of us, and I’m not going to name names, made a $350 major blunder. You know who you are, Magic Moves. We’re teammates!

So that was our trip. It was sweet. Or should I say, it was gnar. Very gnar.