Denver and the Jamaican Cowboy

Well, I won the bet. We are expecting a boy! Friday was a pretty exciting day for Stephanie and me. Around two o'clock, we had the ultrasound performed; it was a very special experience for us, and I suddenly found myself much more excited to be a dad. It really puts things into perspective, knowing that my son will watch the way I live my life and perhaps try to pattern his behavior after mine. Ever since the ultrasound, I have been planning camping, canoing, and other high adventure stuff that we can do together someday.

We drove to Denver after the ultrasound. To tell the truth, I hadn't realized just how far away Denver really was, and we ended up arriving to downtown Denver at 12:30 AM. We stopped at several hotels, but to tell the truth they all reeked of tobacco and looked like something out of a horror movie. Driving along the streets, we were a little alarmed to see how many drunk Mexicans that staggered along the sidewalks, not to mention the fact that all the houses and businesses had barred windows and doors. We finally found a Motel 6, but ended up asking for our money back after the electricity didn't work, the bathroom was dirty, and there was hair in our bed. We eventually made it to a Days Inn, where the lady offered to give us a room for thirty dollars off the original price of $90. We took it.

A Latino stood outside his door and greeted us with a drunken sentence as we climbed the filthy stairs toward the door of our room. He persisted a moment, and I spoke to him in Spanish. He offered us some beer and cigarettes, but I told him we were a little busy. He wanted to help, so I told him to go search on the opposite side of the hotel while we searched around there. He took off running, eager as a drunk man could be for finding a room number. Stephanie was scared out of her mind, because the intoxicated man was having trouble with his depth perception and kept leaning in a little too close for comfort, but eventually I was able to convince him to return to his room.

It wasn't the warmest welcome Stephanie had imagined. We didn't know that we had accidentally entered one of the poorest sections of Denver, and Stephanie just kept saying “This is why my parents have always lived in Utah! I miss Mormons!” I laughed until I was almost crying, it was so funny to watch her reaction to the drunkard. I thought he was hilarious, but perhaps it is because I am so used to speaking in Spanish to the borrachos de Ecuador.

Frankly, our visit was probably one of the worst little vacations we'd ever been on, although I am very excited to begin a new life in a place which will provide us with opportunities to grow and learn. I loved how there were several lakes within a radius of just a few miles of where we will be living.

Yesterday, we (the Carr family and us) called 911 on a guy who was acting very suspicious. He looked like a (as Josh put it) Jamaican cowboy crazy man, and was scoping out the area before hastily jumping into a jeep and driving off. He was wearing white gloves and opened the door without a key, so I ran down far enough to get the license plate number (okay, so I was off one letter....M's look like H's from a distance). It made us pretty popular in the park for a while after that; the cops came and the excitement drew other couples in from all parts of the park. The cops eventually figured out that the Jamaican cowboy was this crazy dude they've dealt with on a million different occasions, and they went over to his house. Apparently, he carries a gun, believes listerine to cure herpes (he's dumped it all over his head on a couple of occasions in the middle of department stores), has lead police on slow-speed, forced-stop chases through Provo and Orem, and lots of other stuff. The cop managed to drop the name of the street the guy lived on, so we all drove through there after leaving the park. After annoying just about every driver on the road with our slow, erratic driving, I told Josh to stop because I had seen the back of a gray jeep. It was him, and we drove into the parking lot to check it out.

It was a fun weekend.