Well, it’s 3am, can’t sleep, took a Tylenol PM, so I have that long to chime in about the awesome CoSprings DSM gettogether… 🙂
Met everyone at Hampden and I-25, chatted for a short while, and then it was time to go…Off we raced through the light at the onramp….right into some lovely 15mph traffic! (Funny, wasn’t like that when I came off at that ramp not but a few minutes beforehand…musta been that there “stevetek” bumper sticker on Ryan’s car threw everyone off…)
There was a fairly small group of us that managed to kinda, almost stay together (Shea, you’re a wild man – we couldn’t hang!), and James LaMere and I wound up driving a good chunk of the way down together, and would have made it all the way, if I weren’t an idiot, not comprehending that he was opening spaces in traffic for me to take…sort of leading-from-behind, if you will…I gave up trying to catch back up just the other side of Castle Rock, on the 90mph prairie just before Monument Hill…
I was really grumpy by the time I finally got to Old C’s (*grumble* “If I really wanted to drive to Colorado Springs by myself, I would have left sooner and taken CO-83, and at least had some fun turns to play with…”*grumble*), but seeing all them damn cars lined up was a blast, and relieved a lot of the grumpies I had.
Lunch was light, two slices and some good conversation with Sherrie, Jen and Hubby, and…James LaMere and daughter (I forgot how cute they still are when they’re only 4 – it’s been a long 8 years since then for yours truly!)… Realized we don’t have these get-togethers nearly often enough when Doug Hayne said howdy, and I didn’t recognize him…(my only defense being that I’d met him only briefly at the Father’s Day event at 2nd Creek – but that’s really no excuse whatsoever…), and I recognized Ryan by sight, but not name… We *really* need to do these get-togethers more often…and get some damn “Hi, My Name Is: Jonathon Barton, black ’90 Tsi” stickers while we’re at it!
Garden of the Gods…Fabulous. Been too long since I was there (used to live 1/2 mile from one of the gates). Pulled up past the line of cars to briefly block traffic at Garden of the Gods and 30th St. (in case the light turned red, we could keep going – that’s a damn long light if you get stuck at it when it’s red! Turned out to be a good, if somewhat unnecessary, idea).
Did it again when we were pulling out of the Visitor Center… when we got back, I heard someone (well, not just someone, I just won’t say who, cause other than this one comment, the guy’s pretty likeable, and I don’t hold it against him…*chuckle*) make some wiseacre comment about me almost getting my ass beat by the drivers the cars I was stopping…Still glad I stopped them – 3 of the 6 cars I held back (a whole 40 seconds worth) wound up turning in behind me at GoG and would have ended up breaking our line of cars up substantially more than we already were. (You think being broken into two groups was bad…the white toyota behind me insisted on poking along at (or under) the posted 20mph – and even at that, I lost him, and he caught up to me 4 times when we came to a trafficjam stop…can’t imagine the gridlock if he’d gotten in among the group of us! *grin*)
Michelle and Evan, Erik A., and 3 or 4 others (whose faces I remember, but not names – damn visual learners) cruised back to Denver at a “leisurely” 5-10 MPH over the flow of traffic. I gotta tell y’all that *that* right there was the most fun of the whole day…as fun as it may be to have 15 cars blowing down I-25 at 125 mph, I’d have to say that it was much more enjoyable (for me, at least) to have the teamwork of having the lead car of the group peel off, move over a lane into a gap, and slow down just a couple mph, slowing that lane down *slightly* and in the process, making a hole that the other 5 cars just flowed into like warm maple syrup… *GRINGRINGRIN* Lather, rinse, repeat, and we made some *damn* fine time getting back to Denver…
It’s not like nobody could tell what we were doing, either…we got our fair share of brights flashed at us from people that couldn’t hang with us – it was *REALLY* fun… Felt like we were starring in…well…in…certainly not TF&TF…maybe instead something more like…
“The Swifter Than Most and The Bloody Well Mildly Irritated”
Michelle swung by my house and *finally* got the chance to pick up the part I’d promised her from Frank’s old Talon, and just about that time, Meg got home from the bookstore, and the 4 of us went out to dinner at Bennigan’s…thus inaugurating the first in what the 4 of us hope to become another burgeoning DSM tradition… Doing things as *friends* that don’t have anything to do with looking under the hood of anyone’s car… *smile*
Don’t any of you fall over now, but we 4 actually managed to have 2+ hours of conversation, and we only talked about cars for *gasp* 5 or 6 minutes – and that was talking about the Pikes Peak Hill Climb, at that…
All in all, it was a great time, and I’m really looking forward to the next one…
…getting sleepy….
PM is aight…