Things to do in Denver when you're... whaaaaat?

Denver! Yes, the porcupine and I took a whirlwind trip to Denver last week, returning to Vermont yesterday… with snow on the ground and a chill in the air, and feeling pretty blessed to be back in this little town. I’m definitely feeling more clear-headed than I have in a while, and had no altitude sickness or jet-lag despite reading all about that before getting on the plane last Wednesday.

We had our usual odd interactions around food and service in restaurants… having to get water pitchers for ourselves, giving up on waiting for a bill and just guessing at what we owed and leaving cash and walking out (telling the hostess what we did and her saying “okay”)… and a myriad of other things leaving us wondering if we just suck the competency out of everyone around us.

By far one of the oddest things we decided to do was a book some time in a sensory deprivation tank. I chose the one that was more like a large bathtub with high ceilings, leaving the porcupine with the “pod” (I was afraid of becoming claustrophobic)… you basically lay in briny water, which supports you, floating, at body temperature — while the room is completely dark. The kind of dark that makes it difficult to tell if your eyes are opened or closed. There are times when you have no sense of where you are, no sense of up or down. Then I discovered that if you gently pushed off of one the walls you could slowly ping-pong yourself around the tank. I think I had more fun in it than you are supposed to, because instead of walking into the waiting room looking completely zen’d out, I proceeded to babble to the friend who was picking us up about how silly it was and how it revved me up — the front desk person didn’t look amused.

It was a fantastic get-away, and I met some great folks (as the porcupine says, I seem to make best friends everywhere I go…) the Denver native who is a political activist who, by the end of the plane ride, welcomed us to visit them, the Chicago woman who was also returning from Denver that I swapped hotel tales with, the cashier at Macy’s who I giggled and swapped thrift store stories with, and the nice men who both offered to swap seats so that the porcupine and I could sit together. Good people, they are out there.

And now I’m back to my cozy little place, the woodstove throwing out some good heat, the car needing to be shoveled out, snow tires go on tomorrow… catching up on work, and catching up with friends and family… I hope you are all well out there, and manage to reboot your system at some point, however that looks…