Western

Last weekend we made a flying visit (both literally and figuratively) out to Colorado for a dear friend's wedding. It rained all day the day of the wedding - quite an aberration for the Denver area, apparently - but it didn't matter, it was still a beautiful day.

Luckily the bride and groom were already prepared with dozens of umbrellas for the guests, they just hadn't known they'd be used against the rain instead of the blazing sun.

I enjoyed the various Rocky Mountain motifs and other Wild West imagery we saw around town. I'm sure it's old hat to locals, but on such a brief visit it helped reassure us that we were indeed somewhere miles from home.


I ventured into this souvenir shop in search of something unintentionally awesome, but unfortunately someone had made an attempt to bring the inventory up to date - or at least up to the '80s - so it mostly consisted of Colorado T-shirts and generic mugs. There were a few beaded barrettes, some cases of bad turquoise, and a rack of "Lil' Sheriff" badges, but otherwise the pickings were slim.

I did consider a pair of Minnetonka moccasins, but they only had my size in electric blue, which seemed wrong, and even those were a bit tight. "They stretch, they stretch!" the saleslady encouraged me, urging me to buy them anyway, but I resisted.


On the flight out, during my three hours of manic Jet Blue satellite TV surfing, I caught a few minutes of the video for the song "500 Miles" by the Scottish band The Proclaimers. Then I heard the same song again during our cab ride back to the airport at the end of our weekend.

Our hotel had this painting by the elevators - the marquee of a local club called the Bluebird, featuring a show by The Proclaimers. At the rehearsal dinner, somebody gave a toast reminiscing about the bride and groom going on an early date ... to a concert at the Bluebird.

And among the guests at the wedding was a young Scottish man, dressed in a kilt of his family tartans, black and yellow on a blue background, oddly similar to the electric blue of the Minnetonkas I tried on earlier that day.