Sheesh

Finally I have returned to the wonderful world of ITS. For all of those who don't know, I was on a trip to Denver this weekend, for some IEEE robotics stuff. After a fun drive to Lawerence Kansas and a pretty good show by Danny V's brother's band (louder guitar on the Muse) I was all ready to go to sleep for the night, wake up and continue the boring drive to Denver. Dan and I (the primary drivers) were ready to sleep, but EVERYONE else decided it would be a good idea to drive through and get there early. So we set out for Denver, Dan and I driving of course, and let me tell you the drive through Kansas SUCKS. There is absolutely nothing in Kansas, lookie there a farm, oh wait it's all farms in KS. At about 6 am Dan decided to stop driving and let someone else take over and drive till Denver. I was riding shotgun most of the way, keeping the driver awake and such. I slept about 2-3 hrs which seemed to be enough. We arrived in Denver midday Thursday and attempted to check into the hotel, but that apparently started at 3pm (lots of time to burn in a city most of us have never been to). At this point we decided to head to the brewery (the New Belgium brewery), and enjoy the rest of the day. On a side note: The New Belgium brewery not only makes some of the best beer, but happens to be one of the coolest places to visit in Denver, they would have given us free beer all day long if we had stayed. If yo are in Denver, GO THERE RIGHT AWAY, and enjoy! After the great experience at the brewery we headed back to the hotel and for once in a week I almost got a good nights sleep. Most of the other people were "van lagged" and wanted to stay in the hotel except for a few of us. Dan decided to go swing dancing with some people he knew in Denver. I stayed in the room until he was done and went with someone else to pick him up, and had a nice drive through downtown denver, after we picked Dan up at about 1:15 am we thought it would be a good idea to head to lookout mountain so that we could see the city at night and just be on a mountain. We had directions from a waitress from earlier in the day and hoped they would get us there. Here they are :
-Take 36 west
-Get off at 80, wait no 85, it could be 58 though (reassuring)
-Go left at the fork in the road (the fork happened to be the exit ramp, so basically exit onto the correct street and you are fine)
-At the FIRST stop light go left, this part might be tricky (we started counting when we got onto 58, started at zero.... kept driving.... still at zero.... long highway.... still at zero.... wait here is a stoplight.... ONE, we are at the FIRST stoplight, wow that was difficult, zero to one was hard)
-Go up the mountain
-Look at stuff at the top of the mountain

So we finally got to the mountain, and I started driving up, scary as hell at night let me tell you. As we progressed up the mountain we stopped at some places so that we could get some pictures and just look at the city at night. When we got up to the top, we stayed for a couple of minutes and I got to do something I have never done before, I peed off the side of a mountain. After we were done doing all the looking we headed back down the other side and hoped it lead to a highway. I kept driving, but knew that Dan would be ok to drive whenever I needed him to because he told me he would. Not 2 minutes into the drive down he was passed out cold in the back seat, it's cool, he would have been ok to drive. We eventually ended up back at the hotel for a decent nights sleep. We woke up a little late, headed out to get some work done on the robot. We arrived at the hotel at about 10 am and we were told that we must be crazy and need to drive another half-hour to begin our work. So we drove to Boulder, got to the school, walked in and again we must have been crazy because we were again at the wrong place (notice a trend?).
We ate lunch, hung out in the hotel room, worked on the robot a little bit and generally waited until we could actually get to the center to test our robot. Everyone is there, all of us ready to register, Dan and I started coding the robot and 3 of the other started getting HAMMERED. At about 1 am one of our teammates came into the room where all the robotics teams were and pass the hell out on the table right next to the entrance for about an hour. We got him home, kept working and eventually at 4:30 am we were kicked out of the robotics room, only to set up in the lobby of the hotel for the rest of the night. A little after 5 am we made the realization that our robot's sensors had died and we couldn't compete any further. At this point I had so much mountain dew that I wasn't about to go to bed so we made a body out of beer boxes and started having fun. The comptetition was fun and we did pretty well for having a disfunctional robot, and overran the buffer of the transmitter station and crashed their program (that was funny). Saturday night was fun just being lazy and such. We woke up Sunday morning and saw it snowing something crazy, which was awesome for the ride home. It was so bad that we had to stay another night in the hotel and leave late on Monday. Even then I-70 was closed most of the day and we ended up leaving around 2:30 pm or so. We finally ended up in St. Louis around 5 am and all went directly to bed. Wow, that was a long one, more to come later today or tomorrow.