So our old friend, and neighbor from new jersey who we hadn’t seen in like 8 years or so came for a visit and she had requested that instead of the typical tourist trap crap we find some roadside oddities or general weirdness.

well, she came to the right place (and the right people)! here are some highlights of what we found..

(a) there’s a gator farm in colorado! –wtf?!

(b) there’s a “beer can castle.” i use the term castle loosely - and beer can for that matter, because there were lots of hubcaps involved too. and in case you can’t see the creepy archway thingy well in this picture, it reads “alcohol + tobacoo is kills / mary jane is healing.” which had us a bit perplexed.. doesn’t “mary jane” make you a slacker? where does a pot smoker get the energy to build a domicile of any kind? wtf?

(c) i think i’m just going to let you wonder about this one…

but this one wasn’t so much a road-side oddity as it was middle of the road randomness.

wtf?!! where are we living??

so we got our money’s worth on the weirdness! of course it helped that the gator farm had a coupon online for 20% off.

we also went to see a U2 tribute band at red rocks, which was quite an oddity too. especially when i saw the bono (the lead singer) off stage up close and he looked like a skinny version of the fat baldwin. oh and if that wasn’t odd enough, a couple got married on stage. wtf!?!!

but colorado’s craziness doesn’t just exist on vacation.. tonight we went to the rocky mountain balloon festival because they were supposed to illuminate the balloons after sunset for an evening flight which i thought would be kinda cool and it’s my birthday weekend so it would be something kinda unique. but after fighting traffic to try and get in the park which we couldn’t have done if a nice traffic cop hadn’t told us about the secret squirrel way in (which took an extra half hour but was worth it), we got to where the balloons were just as they were counting down… 3.. 2.. 1.. and then all the ballons flashed their fireballs.. woohoo!..

for like literally 2 seconds - and then it was dark again. …wait.. that was it? seriously?! wtf?!! and do i really need to go into how the energizer bunny did not keep going and going and going but rather was going going gone?

so the balloon festival was a bust.

but seriously, the thing to remember is that, the weirdest, worst day in crazy colorado is better than the best day in new jersey!!

you can check out more of our roadside colorado pics on flickr - just click here.