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I left Columbus on Jan 3, 2004. I headed west on I-70 through the rest of Ohio, Indiana, and grabbed some lunch at Denny’s in Effingham, Illinois. I went on through Missouri and made my way through Kansas City around mid-evening. I had planned to spend the night somewhere in this area, but I still felt pretty alert, and decided to keep going. I grabbed some dinner at the service plaza on the Kansas turnpike.

I started feeling pretty groggy in the western half of Kansas, plus it was snowing fairly heavily, so I pulled over at a rest stop to take a nap. After about an hour, I woke up feeling alert again, and the snow had tapered off, so I got back on the road.

I got to Brad’s place just before dawn, around 6:30am on Sunday Jan 4. I knocked on the door, and called the cell phones of Brad, Kristin, and Becky (she had flown out on New Years Day), and had to leave messages each time. I knocked some more until they finally woke up and let me in. I crashed on the couch immediately, only to have to wake up an hour later so that we could all grab some breakfast and give Becky a ride back to the airport. Brad, Kristin, and I spent the rest of the day exploring the bike shops, breweries, and coffee shops of downtown Boulder.

On Monday morning (Jan 5), Brad had to head to work, so Kristin and I went to the local IHOP for breakfast, then headed up for a hike on Mt. Sanitas. Before Kristin and I left for our hike, Brad called to warn us of the unusually cold weather outside that day. We misunderstood him to mean that it was 10 degrees below freezing; we found out later it was actually 10 degrees below zero! With the brisk walk through town and up the Mt. Sanitas trail, the temperature didn’t feel too bad, but the cloudy skies made the views less impressive than usual.