The first significant event of the trip happened at 4 AM Sunday morning while driving to Hartford from my house in Hopkinton. As we came around a highway ramp just before the Bradley Airport, we saw an overturned SUV off the side of the road and two young women standing next to it. One was bruised and cut up, dressed like she might have come from a party, and the other was a passer-by. This was just minutes after the accident. The SUV's roof was caved in to the point of touching the steering wheel. The injured woman said she swerved to avoid a deer, and had already called 911 while still upside down, before she crawled out of the car. (Was the cell phone in her hand at the time?) But she was very, very shaken up. The cops arrived in a few minutes and it was clear they didn't want us around. In fact, they were rather nasty to everyone, so we left and continued to the airport.

We arrived in Denver at 9am. With a day to kill, we had plenty of time to get Chris's skis at REI and have lunch and a beer at a brewery in Idaho Springs on the way to Leadville. Beer was already tasting terrible from the Diamox some of us took to ward off altitude sickness. In Leadville (the highest incorporated city in the U.S. at 10,152') we shopped for all of our non-perishable food. We couldn't buy our booze because it was Sunday, and we didn't want to worry about refrigerating perishables, so we left them for tomorrow.

We had a leisurely dinner at a nice Mexican restaurant called The Grill Bar & Cafe, that we found in the remote south end of the city while driving around aimlessly following my GPS directions to a nonexistent Mexican restaurant. When we told the waitress to give our complements to the chef, she brought out the chef to introduce us. She seemed very pleased that someone bothered to compliment her cooking. After dinner we went to the bar in the next room, having a shot of tequila, watching Glenn play pool and gabbing with the locals. We were out too late given the jet lag and 3-hour sleep we all had the night before, but I guess sleep deprivation is what a vacation is all about.