The Colors of Colorado

So camping in Nebraska could have been more pleasant. One, our campsite was covered in tiny little anthills. Two, it rained all night and we woke up with everything around us soggy. Bleh.

Also, the so called wi-fi internet didn't work, so I didn't blog. So we got up, showered, and hit the road for Denver.

When we entered Colorado, our surroundings almost instantaneously became more aesthetically pleasing with rolling hills, a brownish colored road, and a more mixed bunch of vegetation... of many colors.

Colorado also has a lot of hamburgers on legs grazing the plains:


And more cows:


One of my childhood memories of Colorado, since when I was little we had lived in Colorado Springs and Ft. Collins for a little while, is flavored and colored popcorn. So at one of our stops for gas I purchases rainbow popcorn. It made me happy.


And soon, we were in Denver, the Mile High City:


And our first destination in Denver: Beau Jo's Pizza, the best pizza on Earth! Another one of my favorite childhood memories is the delicious honey wheat crust of a cheesy, garlicky, mountain pie. In my family, a Beau Jo's mountain pie might as well be a symbol of our love for one another. But we topped our pizza with artichoke hearts, onions, mushrooms, feta cheese... yummy! We were so hungry though we forgot to take a picture. Oh well, at least Web is a believer now:

After our mountain pie, we headed into downtown. Web hasn't ever been to Denver so I camped out in a hotel lobby to work on some blogging while he explored downtown. He bought sneakers at Payless and didn't take any pictures of downtown, despite having the camera. Pft.

We hung out for awhile and relaxed, but there it was time to go to the Buckhorn Exchange for dinner. The Buckhorn Exchange is another wonder I remembered from the Travel Channel. Buckhorn is the oldest restaurant in Denver, it serves a variety of gourmet and exotic meat, and its decor lets you know you are in Cowboy Country!

Most of the really crazy meats were in the appetizers, so we had to get those. I ordered fried alligator:

Alligator tastes really weird. It is like a chewier chicken, but tastes like it should be swampy seafood. And has a really potent aftertaste. It was really weird, but made me feel at the top of the food chain.

But that wasn't the only weird thing we ordered. Web was brave enough to order Rocky Mountain oysters, aka bull fries, aka fried bull testicles. Here is Web chowing down on some cow manhood:



I tried some too. Bull fries are the ultimate proof that anything fried tastes good, because they weren't bad at all, considering what they were. Kinda like sliced and fried mushrooms... but of a testicular origin.

For our meals we grubbed on elk, quail, cornish game hen, and duck. We might have felt mildly guilty eating our friendly elks if the steak hadn't been grilled to perfection. I found out that cornish game hen tastes exactly like chicken. And Web's new favorite poultry are tender little quails.

After eating more species of animals I thought was possible in one meal, we headed over to our friend Tate's apartment for our lodging. Tate actually let us just borrow the whole studio which was sweet. I also had the pleasure of meeting Knives, his cat who like to bat at my feet when I was trying to sleep.

Into Wild Nebraska

But the real reason why Nebraska was way cooler than Iowa, was its preservation of natural Nebraska wildlife at the Lee G. Simmons Conservation Park & Wildlife Safari. Web and I drove through the park in the Kia and got up and CLOSE with a variety of animals from the Great Plains.

We first met some Nebraskan elk. These guys really couldn't have given two shits about us driving through their territory and talking pictures of them:


We also met the whitetail deer, which were watching us more intently than us watching them. Just some deer chillin':


We then got acquainted with some of Nebraska's avian critters...

Like an owl:

A sandhill crane, that got up in our business:

And swans doing something strange...

The bear and wolf cages ended up being mildly disappointing. One, they are in cages so you can't just drive among man-eating predators. Two, there were no bears in sight. Three, the bears were quite possibly just mislabeled... or eaten...

In the last animal pen we observed a herd of bison. Despite being 6 feet tall and could easy kill us, they were mellow and didn't even look up from grazing as we passed. The white bison to the right is named Dakota, and she has a little mixed baby!

The other animal in the last pen was the pronghorn antelope. And man were they really friendly. Here is one male, not too interested in us but close to the road:

And here is a female that actually followed us a little bit:

But the last, youngest pronghorn, was in love with the Sportage:

He also was very interested in Web:

Nebraska, we learned, is not just home to corn, in fact we saw little corn. In fact, Nebraska is the home to friendly animals and invisible bears.