Colorado - Part 8

I lay awake in bed, anxious and barely able to sleep between the excitement of Avery and the threat of an exorbitantly early rise. I dance the long dance between drunk and hung over to the tune of a lonely ghost playing a single castanet.

I wake myself up and ready myself for a balloon voyage destined never to happen. Such travel must be dangerous, I think, or the purveyors could never stay in business at the cancellation rate we seem to experience (an 'unexplained gust,' I am told, is the cause for alarm amid otherwise perfect weather). The lights in the hotel courtyard (the sun not yet being up) are the giant high-pressure sodium vapor globes that make light pollution activists cry a single tear.

In consolation, we hike up a mountain at dawn. Suffice it to say, I have more than the elevation to surmount. On the way back from breakfast, I notice a sign reading, "The Joint: A Chiropractic Place." I begin to suspect that Colorado is full of such ham-fisted puns.