Day 3.14: Fort Collins, CO to Colorado Springs, CO

Arielle woke up early, packed up some of her things, and went to the front desk to ask about the late check-out. The woman she spoke to was very rude and unhelpful, putting a damper on an otherwise fantastic customer service experience at the hotel. Abe got up a bit later and took a few trips downstairs to load the car. He wasn’t sure where to park by the university, and we ended up getting a ticket that stated “violation – warning only” on it, which seemed fair enough since we hadn’t paid the meter since our car was supposed to be in the system. Abe’s presentation at the conference was slotted for right before the closing lunch, and he was fortunate enough to find the room where it was happening despite the building layouts being extremely confusing. There were about twenty-five people in attendance for his session, When Movies Won’t Let Us Die, which went very well. Only one attendee walked out when the focus turned to zombie movies, and everyone else seemed very engaged.

We were excited to learn that hamburgers and hot dogs were on the menu for lunch, and Abe got to meet a few of the people Arielle had been socializing and networking with over the past few days. We said goodbye to everyone at the conference and set out for Colorado Springs, which is about an hour south of Denver. We probably should have looked at a toll-free route, since our trip on 470 appeared to involve many tolling points that were each $4.70. We’ll see when we get the bill, but at least we made it without too much traffic down there, which we think we avoided by going around Denver. We were warmly greeted by Adina, who we last saw in Florida in February at Shosh and Eric’s wedding, and Matt, and after putting our things down, we went out to dinner. At Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar, we learned about Matt’s meat-only diet while he enjoyed three orders of buffalo chicken wings. Abe got two orders of sweet chili wings, while Arielle got a salted caramel pretzel shake and fried pickles, which she found to be more than satisfactory. We looked out at a nice view of the mountains and went back to their apartment, where we got to sleep relatively early.

Approximate number of miles covered: 124