travelogue 33 by timcaynes

I've often been into denver before and this friday afternoon I needed to go in to denver again because the only store in a 100 mile radius that has the thing I want happens to be in the cherry creek shopping mall which I happen to have been to before when the one thing I wanted was also only available from a store in the cherry creek shopping mall so I figure this might just be a hour's round trip and I'll be back in the hotel room and packed up by 10 because after all I'm getting up at 5 in order to get to the top of a mountain before careering madly across the state to look at a rock and then driving all the way back again. anticipating clement weather with altitudinous blue skies I'm going to buy a great big camera to take pictures of everything I see and spend the next 4 weeks lashed to photoshop and the great big camera I want is at the sony style store in denver. and its gold. well, champagne they call it (exclusive to the sony style store sir) but its kind of gold. what's not to like.

so trundling down to the 36 with the sitting-down equivalent of a spring in my step which in the case of the mustang is a spring in every stop I feel like the evening is going to go well and brian our digital specialist will be seeing me in a jiffy. except I hadn't figured that anywhere in colorado actually has traffic. I mean, I'm not a total dunce which is why I'm heading for I70 at 5am, but duh I wasn't expecting standing traffic from westminster to denver in which I would sit for an hour and a half watching the fuel gauge needle slowly idle towards empty like a VU attached to leonard cohens greatest hits so that I'm turning off the AC and sticking my arm out the window like that helps when its about 95 degrees and you're surrounded by 18 wheelers and I'm considering jumping the car pool lane and trying to get away with it by playing the idiot englishman card which as you can imagine isn't much of a stretch but resign myself to the fact that I'll probably just whimper onto the median and die just as the exit I need comes into view. in fact, I make it to the exit and they cannily have a gas station just outside your peripheral vision so just as you pass it you're heading in the wrong direction but by this time I'm effectively playing out grand theft auto in my head and that means I have no qualms about pulling a 180 in the middle of the street and taking out a few cafe tables as people scatter in a funny triangular pattern which I do and just about stop myself from deliberately crashing the pump and casually lobbing a zippo at it after lighting a camel and walking away with a vest on.

back on track then and only 7pm. I pull into the cherry creek car park which is as empty as all shopping mall car parks and immediately head for the wrong corner of the mall meaning I will spend a good 30 minutes walking its entire length looking for the sony style store rather than consulting a map rather like I do at home when I miss a parking spot and go via the next county to turn around because actually its easier that way. but find it I do. its not like the apple store where willful generation Yers determine your requirements before you knew you had any and already have your new life in a bag at the checkout. no, sony style is something different. its staffed by a hard core of technology experts who know everything there is to know about 1 product and actually don't care whether you buy it or not because they're busy. but they're polite, in a looking-at-their-watch kind of way and my man shows me the a300 in gold and I try to get a feel for it with the alarm cord still attached even though I know I'm just going to buy it anyway, oh, and the memory card, no that's it, no case, no, no filters, no spare battery pack, no, just the camera. yes, this one. yes I'm english. no I don't need extended warranty in that case, as I'm going to drop it onto a runway as soon as I land in the UK and just forget I ever bought it. bye.

the trip back from denver was rather less painful, punctuated by an interesting stop at another gas station to stock up on necessities for tomorrow's travel including a fail! on the card I just used to buy the camera as obviously it must be somebody else stealing my cards and spending my money so extravagantly and now I'm in the bathroom, obviously having spent 2 hours taking pictures of hotel rooms, wondering whether to pack now (at midnight) or tomorrow (in a few hours) and I spend an hour working that one out before I pack myself and zip up for the night.

© Tim Caynes. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Disclaimer: I work for Sun Microsystems, but this is nothing to do with them and it's all my fault, even though I might sometimes mention Solaris or something.