wake up dammit

19 hours of travelling and I’m sat in front a tv that’s 5 feet off the ground trying to focus on re-runs of CSI or something that’s got loads of earnest looking americans picking up suspicious objects from the floor of smoky warehouses in slowmotion and then cross fading to a train that goes over your head like what it does in the French Connection until some words or other slide into the frame and then just as I get it the adverts cut in and there’s a massive Nissan Globalwarmer driving across a desert with a boat in the back of it and a caption comes up at the bottom saying ‘professional driver in a simulated desert thats not real so dont do this at home in wisconsin because itll be all your fault when the chassis falls to bits and a flying camshaft takes out Mrs. Pantiles at number 47’. I must be dead in Colorado.

7 years ago all this was fields, well, probably a golf course, but now it’s full of hotels that you can see from 17 miles away but apparently I can’t find the entrance to without driving the wrong way up highway 36 and then taking a turning onto Interlocken and then realizing every turning here is called Interlocken so I’m no closer to my bed than I was 18 hours ago when I got out of it at 7 in the morning and said goodbye to my family like it was a trip across antartica but they actually were still asleep and just kind of said ‘yeah, er, bye’. in between then and now, which seems like about 5 fat tires and 2 bar meals in the tap room talking to Brad about cutting your thumb and listening to Tom going on about wine which is just a bit warm, but definitely not corked, I managed to squeeze in a bus a plane and a chevy cheapskate. oh, and a taxi to the bus station, where Ron dropped me off as we saw a couple kissing each other goodbye and he said ‘youre not getting one of those mate!’ and he was right, even if I offered him double the fare. I usually stay in a rubbish hotel in the heathrow flight path the night before flying out, well its practically on the runway, just at the point where they dump 10 hours worth waste over berkshire, but the flight to denver leaves at 15:50, so rather than taking 2 weekends out I decided to take the bus in the morning to the airport, because the bus isn’t that bad really. unless it’s sunday morning at 7 oclock and the driver has obviously just had a row about eggs with his wife and will happily call the IT specialist an ‘arsehole’ who just put his bag in the luggage compartment marked in his head as ‘gatwick’ instead of the secret one called ‘heathrow’. that was the longest 4 hour bus journey ever. so I get to heathrow about 4 hours before I need to and because I’ve checked in online, I can’t check in yet and so I have to sit in the pre-departures ‘seating area’ which is like finding a dry piece of newspaper to sit on at glastonbury – funny for 2 seconds. 2 hours later I can check in, but that’s alright, because my online check-in means I ‘beat the queues’. apart from the queue that is everybody who has checked in online for British Airways, which is the longest queue of all queues in this collection of queues that is a check in area at heathrow airport.

anyway, as Patricia says, BA’s service onboard is impeccable, even thought the 777 I’m sat in is pants compared to a 747-400 and I’m damned if I can work out when Hotel Rwanda is going to start, so I end up watching Hide and Seek instead which has that 6th sense twist that you kick yourself for not seeing an hour before and then de niro goes all cape fear/tribble, which just isn’t so good at 60, especially when you can see him in Meet the Fockers on channel 16 on the screen on the seat next door. kind of takes the tension out of it when he’s simultaneously wielding a blood-spattered spade and rescuing a toy dog from a toilet . still, dakota fanning was a great dark-haired miseryguts. I managed to squeeze in another film I’ve already completely forgotten about before we landed and no sooner had I stepped off the Avis shuttle bus than I realized I probably couldn’t find my way out of airport in the chevy preferredaccount without at least breathing some real air. I stopped for a while in the car lot and remembered that last time I came here with Chris, Air Force 1 was just landing and we watched it taxi up to the gate where will smith and tommy lee jones appeared from a range rover and we got whisked away to the marriot in Boulder.

having eventually negotiated InterlockenEverywhere I was checked into the Omni and there I sat on the end of the the bed, after a couple of swift ones in the tap room talking with a nice woman from StorageTek about Malcolm Glazer and bikes, flicking through the interactive services menu to see if the bar bill was already on my online statement which it wasn’t which I though was interesting but actually soon realized that just meant I should go to bed and stop being so sad. for some reason I woke up on the hour, every hour, until it was time to get up again. I can’t explain that, but I’ll probably not try and program the radio alarm clock and the p800 and the tv and wake up service all at the same time tonight.