The Week in Review (Thursday June 11th)

This last week was a little wild.

We left Dave's family in San Diego last Thursday to fly to Denver. We had to get to Denver Thursday night, because the bus was picking Ray up early on Friday morning. So we left California at about 6:30pm. We should have left an hour earlier, but there must have been some massive storms in the Midwest, and it seemed like every flight out of San Doego was delayed. I have never seen so many people packed into a terminal.

The flight went fine, and we made it into Denver right before a massive storm hit the Mile High City. I had to thank the travel gods, because had we been 10 minutes later, we probably wouldn't have Bern able to land. We probably would have been diverted to another airport. And that probably would have destroyed our carefully constructed travel plans.

So we got to Denver safe, sound and slightly tired. We called our hotel, the Crowne Plaza, to send a shuttle to get us, grabbed our bags and walked outside to wait.

And wait.

And wait.

In a storm.

Now, for those of you who don't know, the Denver Airport is probably America's most inconveinient major airport. For some reason, they built it 30 miles from Denver.
And at least 15 miles from anything else. It's bizarre. In order to get there you get on this road and drive through fields of nothing...for 30 miles!!!

So there are no quick rides from the airport into town. Instead, the airport's isolation has forced the creation of these islands of hotels along the road to the airport. In the middle of a field all of a sudden you'll see a sign for what could be a neighboorhood or a condo complex --something like "Pineywood Gardens" or "Mountainview Manor" -- but instead of condos there is a clump of national hotel chains peppered with Chili's and T.G.I.Fridays. It's very weird, and yes, a little depressing.

So all of these hotels have shuttles to and from the aiport. And outside the airport there's a place where everyone waits for these shuttles. And Dave and I were waiting there, in the rain for what seemed like forever, with the wind whipping around us, watching what seemed like every other hotel shuttle pull up and load up with passengers headed for warm beds. Our baby was sleeping all bundles up in her stroller, totally unperturbed by the situation. But Dave and I... We were seriously perturbed.

We tried calling the hotel to get them to give us a read on when the shuttle would get there, but 'Twasn't any good. So when we a nice gentleman who worked as a van wrangler offered to get one of the communter vans to take us to our hotel...well we jumped at that chance.

Well our proactiveness must have pissed off the hotel employees, (I guess we should have suffered longer in the cold, *with our baby* rather than not use the shuttle they sent us) because we got the most insanely rude reaction at check in ever. The woman behind the desk refused to look us in the eye, much less smile or be the slightest bit helpful.

The 24 hour restaurant was of course closed, so Dave and I dined on chips and a candy bar--the only sustanence available to us.

By the time we hit the bed at midnight, we were done.

5 hours later we were up again, back on a hotel shuttle (another near debacle. It was like there was no one in charge at the Crowne Plaza Denver Airport). And headed to the Airport, where we me up with Ray and the bus.

And headed to Vernal, Utah.







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