travelogue 26
lookit. over the edge sweetie. lookit! a train! AAAAAAAAAAAH! MOMMEEEEEE! it’s only 1000 feet down. and we’re still in the visitor centre. for goodness sake.
apparently this was all built by men in stripey suits with toothpicks and saliva. then 100 years later somebody jumps off it attached by a rubber band while cooking waffles in the shape of richard nixon. you’ve got to like that. as it turns out, it’s just a bunch of planks held together with chicken wire and really hard pencils so you won’t get me trundling the kia sorrento over there. I’ll walk thanks. maybe I’ll hang around a bit to see how wobbly it goes. you’re not coming over in that are you. wait. no, wait. I want to get off. damn.
I got up early to avoid the queue, which was just as well, as it’s midday and there is 1 person in front of me at the pay booth for the royal gorge bridge at canon city. there are 4 more people actually in the park. and that’s it. there must be a rerun of the 1998 superbowl on the telly or something. or this will be really boring. I drove for 3 hours to see this, so I hope not. actually, it’s not. I’ve got my w1 and so I’ll be spending the next 3 hours lying down in the middle of a suspension bridge taking pictures of nissans as they roll over my head and leaning out of the cable car window to get a shot of the railroad over half a mile down there in the valley. I’ll also spend 30 minutes taking pictures of myself looking in a mirrored window of a faux colorado trading post trying to get a mountain reflected in my sunglasses reflected in the window without breaking into parallax.
I walk over. I walk back. I get the cable car over. I walk around a bit. I get the cable car back. I check out the closed cafes and foodstalls. I go down to the floor of the gorge in the steepest incline railway in the world. I go back up to the top of the gorge in the steepest incline railway in the world. I eat an apple. I get in the kia surrender and drive off the edge of a cliff, which was also built by the same people who build the bridge, but on their days off, which they didn’t have, because they were all murderers and tax frauds banged up in the prison capital of colorado, good old canon city. I get lost by a dirt bike track and then head back to the hotel where I eat the head of a buffalo and lie down in the hallway jibbering about man bags.