After leaving St. Louis we drive until midnight. Too tired to drive a single minute more, we stay at the first budget hotel we come across. We're in Abaleene, Kansas. Wake-up call: 5:30AM.

"I can't believe we're not there yet."

There are some amazing cloud formations on the open plain!

And we make it just in time to buy scalper's tickets, get footlongs and get to our seats! It's a beautiful, hot, sunny day in downtown Denver.

Coors Field is humongous!

It's a great baseball game! Here's the official commentary--four homeruns, great defense, and a play at the plate that cost Colorado the game. And to top it all off, the Rockies' manager got thrown out and Dave caught a 400ft. Charles Johnson homerun ball in the bottom of the ninth!

We checkout LoDo Denver (Lower Downtown--historic district) and have a drink at a cool little restaurant. Our waiter tells us about this great place called Idaho Springs, which sounds like the perfect spot to stop at for the night. We head out, hoping to get there before dark.

The only way to keep yourself occupied while the navigator sleeps is to take "artistic" while-driving pictures...

I like to call this one "Truck".

The Rockies are beautiful. The highway snakes around and through the peaks. We're so high up that our bag of Doritos pops!

A mountain lake: the first water we've seen in days.

A herd of insurgent mountain goats delay us a bit, but we finally pull into the famed Idaho Springs.

The Springs is an old gold mining town! With any luck, there'll still be some sparkly precious metals left...

After a brief trek alongside a mountain stream in search of golden treasure, we realize that we don't have time to conduct a thorough-enough search and head towards "downtown Idaho Springs" (all of a half a street long) where we confer with locals about the best place to stay. They recommend Indian Springs Resort.

It turns out this "resort" is more of a hippie commune. We check out the hot springs and mud baths (a.k.a. a nude pool in a greenhouse and some cement tunnels with pits of "mud-like" goup in them). There are millions of naked people walking around down there, and it all seems very dingy. We decide to skip those and look for some dinner.

Dave calls George and The Fam to tell them that he's still alive that he's discovered The TRUE Meaning of Life and decided to move to Idaho Springs and live in a nudist colony.

We can't find anywhere to eat in town, so we dig through the bottomless cooler and find a scrap of cheese, a lonely tomato, some hummus, a few wheat thins, and a neglected pita. Paired with a bottle of wine, it's the perfect dinner. (Okay, well it wasn't GREAT, but when you're a transient in a nudist settlement, how picky can you be?).