On the Road

The clock finally struck “tits!” and we happened to be in the State of Nebraska.

We were looking for a strip club run by a fella named Jeremy that was supposed to sit on the Nebraska/Iowa state line. That proved difficult, since the state line is the Missouri River. We crossed the bridge into Iowa and followed a sign for “casino”… thinking we might ask casino type folk about the location of the strip club. A feisty fifty-something blonde named Karen overheard me asking at the door, came over and gave me directions to the “best litle tittie bar in Iowa”… a place she said she owned. “I’ll meet ya there” she shouted from her white Cadillac. How could I refuse.

When we got there 2 girls named Trina and Roxy (above) were sitting at the bar, looking bored and lamenting it being a Monday. Behind the bar was Rachel, with a great smile, a good head on her shoulders, but no apparent desire to leave the place where she was born. Ogre was a 6 foot 6, 400 hundred pound, baby-faced good ole boy, just a few years past his small-town football hero prime. He was obviously there to bounce the occassional tittie toucher, but was trying to graduate up to the higher-paying, less violent work behind the bar.

Karen had apparently called ahead and said that we should be taken care of.

We had ourselves a real good time at Lipstix in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Great people watching there.

Though we had planned to spend the night at the Vedauwoo Rocks State Park east of Laramie, Wyoming, we were forced to come down into Colorado instead. We spent most of the day crossing the Rocky Mountains on Intersate 80 between Rock Springs and Cheyenne. At a maximum elevation of nearly 9,000 feet, we suffered snow, wind and difficult road conditions. By Laramie we could see that there was blue sky ahead in the distance, but it was still just too damned cold and miserable there to think about adhering to our original plan.

Once we crossed the state line into Colorado, everything changed. The sky opened up above our heads, the sun melted what snow and ice still clung to the wiper blades and the air was dry and crisp.

We still wanted to camp some place beautiful, so at the suggestion of some locals we made our way to the Horsetooth Reservoir State Park. About 10 miles outside Fort Collins and up a little ways into the Rocky Mountain foothills, the RV park sits in a wide basin at the southern end of the reservoir.

It was plenty cold over night, and it even sprinkled on us a bit. But we geared up for a hike and dragged our pampered city asses out onto the lake bed. Joe had a miner’s type halogen light strapped to his forehead and I carried a 6-volt lantern in my hand.

It was nearly as dark as it was cold, and we set ourselves the simple goal of finding water’s edge. We had a rough memory of where the lake was from the day-time, but we couldn’t see shit. At one point the ground under foot became oddly soft and training my lantern beam on it I saw a mat of short weeds and a texture of dirt that reminded me we were walking in a lake bed. This is about when I began to feel like an idiot. A few steps later we could feel big, fat drops of lake water carried up by the gusting wind against our faces. We must be getting close!

Did I mention it was very cold?

Well, we never made it to the water’s edge. But on the walk back to to the rig we understood something about playing in the cold and how a lot of the fun you have when you’re “out there” depends on having a warm place to return to when you’re done.