Lindsey and Dean's Wholly Unoriginal Yet Meticulously Recorded Manifestation of Destiny: 2009

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

FL @ RR

As someone who can have trouble expressing excitement beyond 'bemused,' watching Lindsey squeal with glee each of the half-dozen+ times we passed within sight of Ship Rock and Creation Rock - aka: Red Rocks - was a treat. Lindsey's pictures of the rocks are both beautiful and little testaments to the sheer will power it seemed to take for her to sit still long enough to shoot them.
They are astounding, especially when seen from a distance. They rip through a tan rolling valley, adding some alarming red to an otherwise prosaic scene.
It was just below those audacious rocks in the parking lot that Lindsey and I got our first impressions of how the night would go.
Flaming Lips fans mean business.
We saw three bananas drinking beer. We saw panda bears, rabbits, fairies, lopsided asymmetrical mohawks and flower-adorned symmetrical mohawks. We saw what could only be described as a space cowboy.
This was going to be awesome.
The Concert(!!!)
The closest thing to justice I can do to the concert is to report that the experience made this cynic think in terms of 'love,' 'peace,' 'purify,' 'psychic energy,' etc. for a good 24 hours (but we were smart enough not to attempt any writing in this period, weren't we?).
All I can say is: Go to a Flaming Lips concert. Just do it. Bring an old Halloween costume and a laser pointer and just go. It is a happy and purifying (hey!) experience.
Basically it was Wayne Coyne playing with the audience and the audience playing right back.
I believe I spent the first half hour with a stupid grin on my face -- stone cold sober, mind you -- not really able to comprehend what was going on. I must have blown a fuse or something because I have now are fragmented memories.
I remember the band appearing and waving from a womb-door and Coyne out of a giant hamster ball. I remember 1-2 dozen person-sized inflatable balls bouncing around the audience. I remember boy-sheep and girl-cows hopping and dancing, respectively, on either side of the stage. I remember Coyne riding around piggyback on a gorilla for a song. I remember more confetti than I'd ever seen in a month come out of the stage in under two minutes. I remember the audience throwing hundreds of glo-sticks at Coyne in a failed attempt at "psychedelic plastic rain."
I remember Coyne asking us to hold up the peace sign as hard as we could and Lindsey and I holding up two fingers each as hard as we could. I remember looking out at the lights of Denver laid out behind the stage and honestly wondering for a second if we had woken the city (about 10 miles away) up.
So, in short, we had fun.

Day 1.5-2.5

The backroads of southern South Dakota and NW Nebraska capture the imagination the only way open, empty places can. The land changes back and forth between horizon-stretching grassland and rolling hills and buttes. Both are, at the most, sparsely populated by cattle. (Lindsey at one point: "look, people!")
For some reason my brain keeps on insisting that something I've long been looking for, something important, can be found tucked into the folds of those hills or at the top of that ridge. I think Lindsey put it best at one scenic overlook: "I just want to run all over those."
The towns out here seem to be gladly forgotten outposts resisting the winds and change alike. Of course, that's a romantic/bullshit interpretation, but the universally peeling paint, aged signs, and overall lack of visible evidence beyond the cars and gas pumps that it is later than 1982 prod the imagination.
The other cool thing about being in the middle of nowhere is the speed limits are high and seem to be more suggestions than rules. We both enjoyed twisting and turning at 80+ mph.
The novelty and speed put us in good spirits. A snippet:
L: "I should be a race car driver." *accelerates around a minivan and makes her passenger grip the handrest like a nervous parent teaching a lead-footed teenager*
"I especially love passing."
D: "Looks like you've got a double-pass coming up" *indicates at a truck-SUV clot ahead*
L: "Nope, I never do two people at once."
D: *giggles and grabs notepad to record moment for posterity*
We proceeded in this fashion to our campsite in Ft. Robinson, NE (where Lindsey took her gorgeous star pictures) and again the next day towards Denver and the Flaming Lips!!

lindsey+stegosaurus=luv4evaaa

Tuesday AKA dinosaur day!

Utah Field House of Natural History in Vernal, Utah. Scenics from Dinosaur National Monument and the Tetons.

Photos from Sunday/Monday

Monday, August 24, 2009

Day 1ish

Ok, so this was technically Day 2, but as the original Day 1 involved driving from Stevens Pt., WI to Minneapolis, MN (the Oregon Trail equivalent of going from Nauvoo to Council Bluffs), I am officially rechristening Day 2 to Day 1.

As it was our first day, we were abel to leave bright eyed, bushy tailed and only slightly hungover, so we cheerily dove into America's beautiful description-demanding Interstate System.

Three-hundred miles later, we stopped for gas. Oh!: I also bought a beefstick.

About 350 miles after that, we stopped for gas again.

To be fair, there was stuff to see on I-90. Or, at least, the nothing to see in SW Minnesota and South Dakota was different enough than the nothing to see we're used to on the interstates in eastern Iowa, central Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Example: SW Minnesota is big. As we left the relative density of the Austins, Faribaults, Rochesters, et al., and the horizon expanded, some weird infra-physics law kicked in, and the wind turbines (which Lindsey seems to have some sort of spiritual connection to; I don't know if we passed a single windmill that didn't receive an awed, gaping stare), power lines, billboards, and even other cars on the road ballooned to gargantuan proportions in response to the lower-pressure environment. I half expected my puny little urban body to bloat like a saltwater fish dropped into a river.

After clearing Sioux Falls, it quickly became clear that either Mitchell, SD was the place to be or that the roadside advertising industry employs a sizeable fraction of the South Dakota workforce.

We decided that when on I-90 one should probably heed billboards that at points had over one corn pun (the Corn Palace has great "ear-chitecture," we were informed) per mile.

Mitchell, SD seems to be a semi-intentional homage to roadside americana of the past 60 years. The cultural epicenter of Mitchell is, of course, the Corn Palace (fun fact South Dakotaphiles: the interior of the Corn Palace is mostly an auditorium/gym complete with ceiling-hung score cube!), which presides over a small fiefdom of tacky 50's-era motels, kitsch outlets, and a wide variety of "museums," including an abandoned Doll Museum (creepy!). The only other thing to be said about Mitchell is that the Corn Palace, for all its hype, does truly suck. Go there only to say you have gone there and to tell other people that it sucks.

The rest of the time on I-90 was pretty boring outside of all the Wall Drug billboards (there must either be a small army of billboard gremlins based out of Wall or the South Dakota landscape naturally grows corny-ass billboards like "Wall-ways in season!" that are actually closer to weeds than marketing) and an awesome Christian radio program on masculine friendships ("I know I need a buddy, but how far can this buddy thing go?" and "when a man does open his chest [and becomes close to another man] there is a prize worth having").

OK campers, but we are wearing out our welcome at this Bruegger's, so the details of the rest of Day 1 will have to wait a little while.

A taste: come back to find out why Lindsey refuses to "do two people at once."

Ok, off to places already discovered and municipalized! Until next time,

-L&D