Denver

Happy Easter everyone! Christ is risen!
So sorry that I was not able to keep up with my pledge to update weekly but I am sure that my hilarious recount of all the fun I had last weekend will help you forgive me. So last weekend my labgroup went to Denver. It was for a conference with the research group we are part of. We work with a couple of universities (like Denver University) and with a medical device company and share the data that we collect with them. So we were going to present our current research to them and they were going to show us what they had been working on and what we had to learn from them. I had a decent bit of data on my specimen but still did not have my slides put together. I thought that this would be the biggest obstacle to a low stress weekend.
The plan was to leave on Thursday at noon and arrive in Denver between 10 and 11pm. Then present our group research on Friday morning. I had leftovers in the freezer plus I bought a few frozen dinners for Hubii to make while I was away. Further, Hubii had plans for Thursday and Friday evening (a piano recital and a play: Julius Caesar). So all was set at home. I just had to work on my slides on the way there or early Friday morning.
Well, as the guys in the lab were in charge of getting the rental cars we didn't end up leaving until 1pm. No problem, just an hour, not too bad a set back. The trip across Kansas was mostly uneventful. Long, boring, tedious, about 6 hours of flat highway. Well, it is Kansas after all. It starts to rain and possibly hail (it sounded like hail but I couldn't see anything on the road). After we stop for dinner I take over driving one of the cars. After about 20 minutes it starts to snow and then it starts to be ridiculously hard to see and then the wind starts pushing my car around. I comment that if I were making this trip with Hubii this would be the point at which I make him do the driving. But we keep going, 45 mph or slower on a 75 mph interstate. eventually we make it into Colorado and I think, great only 3 more hours and I will be in nice, clean, safe, hotel room. Then I see that the gates on the interstate are closed and we need get off at the coming exit.
We drive into a town that is completely dark, even the McDonald's is dark. We realize that the power is out in this town and the McDonald's workers are leaving for the night. Thankfully about 15 minutes later the power comes back to the town and we drive to the nearby gas station and hang out in their food mart. We were hoping that as the storm was heading east and we were heading west that the gates would be up soon. It was about 9pm and we stood around the food mart (which was quite large) and drank gas station coffee. I called Hubii to update him on our situation. We call the DOT hotline to get updates on road closures. At about 10 we start to pull chairs from the attached restaurant and sit around. Then the power goes off again. The gas station is actually quite full of people. Lots of people who were heading towards Denver or Kansas City were stuck there. There was even an Army unit hanging out in the restaurant area. We start to play price is right with the items in the gas station. Then we start to fall asleep. At about 11pm my advisor decides that we won't be travelling anymore that night and would have to find a place to stay in this town. We try to call the nearby hotels but the only hotel that is picking up is completely occupied. At midnight the power finally comes back. We are able to call a hotel and find enough rooms for the group. Great! Well, we learn to be thankful for small blessings. Like the fact that the room does not have any dead insects in it. Supposedly the rooms we got had been closed all winter and they hadn't cleaned it (they weren't expecting to be inundated with stuck travelers). No insects, but a fair number of mouse droppings :S . Well it was just one night, and I could have slept anywhere after staying up till midnight in a gas station.
The next day we found out that the gates finally opened at 4am that morning. We left at about 7am and drove straight to Denver. Thankfully I finished my presentation in the car on the way there. I gave a short (very short) powerpoint presentation and as I was the last presenter people were more interested in moving on than in asking too many questions. Which was good, I hadn't really practiced my presentation a lot.
Phew, what a crazy trip! There are more, not so exciting details, about the rest of our time in Denver but I need to get to bed. Also, look forward to a posting on our Easter trip to Iowa.