Day #5: Wild Weather

Woke up with a gnarly hangover at the anarchist house. The same people who gave me a ride to SLC said they were willing to let me ride with them to Denver. So I spent the majority of the morning kicking back and trying to hydrate. 

Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday the anarchists put on Food Not Bombs in the park near their house. They get donations from the grocery stores around town and line them up in boxes as a makeshift food bank. So I helped them move everything to the park and hand out some free food. 

My ride picked me up around one and we hit the road for the 8 hour drive to Denver. Thanks to Facebook I found out my cousin Evan lives in Boulder and they said they could drop me off there. 

We got to Wyoming and I recalled the scene in SLC Punk where they drive there to buy real beer (5% alcohol beer,) and the people from Wyoming think they're devil worshiping aliens. That's exactly what it was like for us three hipster/hippie kids driving a yellow Mini Cooper. 

There was some good scenery too. I thought by going north I'd miss some of the red rocks but there were still a few. 

Enough with the boring stuff though. Undoubtedly the coolest think to happen on day five was a few more hours east. I was driving and this HUGE cloud was coming up in front of us. 

We had heard about some tornados in the Denver area, but we were still about two hundred miles away. I kept thinking we'd cut south of the storm, but the freeway kept turning right into it. As soon as we got to the point where you could see rain and the clouds were right on too if us, I look to my left and there's a funnel cloud. It was only a little guy, but it was a tornado. It couldn't have been more than a mile north of us. Then the rain came. One part of the road was completely covered in hail and water, and I'm driving this guy's mom's fancy, new Mini Cooper. I'm thinking we're about to get sucked up into Oz, but we got through the rain after about thirty seconds and looked back to see the tornado roping out. 

I won't lie. I've seen more than my fair share if Storm Chasers. I was really hoping to see a tornado on this trip. People chase tornadoes and never see them, and I got lucky a few miles past the Continental Divide. Either way, I made it safely to Evan's and plan to tear down Boulder on Friday night.