What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas

a Man vs Food location, called Hot'n'Juicy crawfish

Colorado!

Travel day to Las Vegas,

Today was a big day, we attack the Rockies! Our first stop involved taking in The Garden of the Gods which was about 20 minutes outside of Colorado Springs, it was a vastly impressive place, I was driving today and I got quite a bit of fun out of driving up dirt tracks in our huge Ford Explorer along the side of a mountain to get some great views and photo’s.

 

The views driving into the Rockies got perpetually greater, like a drum roll of natural beauty culminating with a 14,000ft climb up a slow winding road that clung to the cliff face, sometimes narrowing down to a single lane, this was the best drive of my life, we went through valleys carved by glaciers of old and lakes spanning large plains that appear out of nowhere. We went through numerous temperature ranges, mountain ranges and huge baron plains of nothingness. These pictures unfortunately do not do it any justice but hopefully they can give you a taste of a place so beautiful and so unexpected that perhaps one day you will find your way there.

Aspen! Aspen was a big stop for the sole reason that this was the place that Dumb and Dumber’s epic journey culminated. Unfortunately Dumb and Dumber was not actually filmed here! According to the tourist information lady there, people are always coming in asking questions about that film, so she couldn’t tell us any places that were in the film! Which is the only reason we came here! Apart from that Aspen really doesn’t have anything to offer, it’s a boring place with boring people, and it was expensive (still cheap compared to London though).

At Aspen Paolo and I swapped the role of driver, today in total we would have driven almost 10 hours, by the time it was dark we were having major problems dealing with the amount of bugs on our windscreen. By now we were in Utah where there is NOTHING apart from bugs, we would go 200 miles between gas stations, although seeing the moonlight of a crisp clear night sky light up the cliffs of the back end of the Rockies was incredible, I couldn’t get a photo of this as it wouldn’t show up, you will have to go and experience it for yourself.

We stopped 2 hours outside of Las Vegas and settled in for the night ready to hit Vegas in the daylight!

States so far:

Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, 

Colorado Springs

20^th September

We awoke early wanting to finish the drive to Colorado Springs in the day light. The views were stunning and was a subtle introduction to the rockies. Half way through the trip to Colorado Springs we had a warning light on the car, the oil needed changing, we still had an hour of driving so it was going to be fine but the warning light took up all the dash board information and we couldn’t see anything else. We couldn’t believe that we had managed to work the car so hardcore that it already needed an oil change.

We stopped at an Applebee’s on the way, it was another one of the American food chains that we hadn’t eaten at yet, it was basically a poor mans version of TGI Fridays.

We both chose the trio selection, which was a selection of 3 smaller dishes from the main menu. We had cheeseburger sliders, steak enchilladas, buffalo wings, spinach and artichoke dip and spicy queso dip.

A few miles from Colorado Springs we saw a sign for Seven Falls, we had heard about it and it was on a website as one of the must see places in Colorado Springs so we side tracked over to it. The scenery was grand and it was definitely one of the things that we were really trying to do whilst in the Rockies, there were 225 steps to the top of this waterfall, which is an effort when you are 7000ft above sea level and haven’t acclimatized yet. There were bear warnings everywhere but it was okay because Paolo had a stick.

 

After about 2 hours of tracking through the area around the seven falls and trying to find bears we decided that we should make our way into town in order to get our oil changed before places started to close. We managed to get it done for $30 which the rental company said that they would cover. Our hotel for the night was a B&B and it was a quaint old fashioned house like the one Forrest Gump grew up in, the land lady was very nice and the room was a lot bigger than we expected. The lady had made cookies for us and was very welcoming.

For dinner we strolled into town to view what life was like in Colorado Springs, it’s a nice place, quite but very safe. We settled on going for some fondue at the Melting Pot, there we had a 4 course meal which involved a cheese fondue, a beef broth fondue and a chocolate fondue! Epic meal, it took us about 2 hours to eat because it was so interactive and so much fun! Here are some pictures of the meal.

We headed home and got our fix of Jersey Shore for a few hours before bed. 

Steak glorious steak!

19^th September

Okay so essentially today was simply a travel day to Colorado Springs, we were leaving Oklahoma and Purdie (/cry) and we were making our way west bound, today would be the day that we covered the most ground in a westward direction so far. There is not much to say about this day. The landscape of Oklahoma and that top part of Texas are very flat and baron. I had purchased the audiobook of Stephan Fry and that was keeping us company for our drive. Paolo was driving until the first stop which was Amarillo. Amarillo is the scene for the first ever Man vs. Food episode, it is practically the basis of the show, it is the home of the 72oz steak! The Big Texan is the name of the restaurant. It is one of the most famous steak houses in the world, and its for a good reason! Im sorry to have to say this again, and once again go on about food, but I was not blessed with the literary ability to describe how good this steak was. You may wonder how a steak can differentiate from another seeing as it is the same thing really, but I have eaten at the best steak house in New York on a previous visit and this steak at the Big Texan was far beyond that, we both ordered a 18oz fillet steak each. The 18oz fillet steak was $27… $27 for 18oz of FILLET STEAK! Incredible, I had mine rare, bloody and delicious! With Texan rice, Paolo had it medium with mash and gravy which he said was incredible. Paolo’s second part of the steak was not cooked medium so he got a whole new section with an extra serving of mash. Brilliant! Brilliant! Brilliant! Amarillo was quite out of the way for us but I am so glad we did it, there is not very much in Amarillo at all, but I beg of you, if you ever travel through America, make this stop! Its incredible! The pictures do not do justice to the rustic feel of the place, the welcoming warmth of the place, its an experience that I am honored to have had. I wish I could give visitors to England an experience that was as genuine and satisfying.

As I said previously this was just a travel day, so the rest of the night I drove through for about 4 hours into the night, from Amarillo to Trinidad in Colorado, about 3 hours away from Colorado Springs. We went from 100f in Texas to 65f in Colorado.

Teach me how to Dougie

18^th September,

Five guys scattered around an apartment, with the after math of a big night of drinking and random bouts of wrestling. I was asleep on the floor along with Paul’s friend David, Paul and David Purdie were both in the bed, Paolo and Justin were in the living room on the sofa’s. Slowly one by one we woke up, everything went into the dishwasher and we begrudgingly got ready to go outside, we were all hungry for any nutrition. Today was a big American football day between Oklahoma State University (home) and Tulsa (away). So the campus was awash with people and drowned in orange. We had our minds set on pizza; on campus there was a pizza place that was voted Oklahoma’s best pizza! As prestigious as that title may appear as it strikes the mind, it had a lot to live up to, after all we had driven through Oklahoma and it wouldn’t be far off to say on the box that it was ‘one of Oklahoma’s few pizza’s’ let alone one of the best, I doubted the requisite to be considered Oklahoma’s best, but I took Purdies better judgement and he recommended it. We all made our way over, Paolo, David, Justin and I walked our way through campus and Paul and David Purdie moved their cars to park. They got their first and we had to queue for around 30minutes which was just accentuating the crave for some food of any form. At this point really we would be happy have anything. The queue was a good sign for the quality but it was also game day and their seemed to be queues for everything.

We ordered two pizza’s between the 6 of us and I must say that it topped the pizza’s we had in New York by far, save Spummoni’s in Brooklyn which was incredible and it didn’t have anything on the Atlanta Pie in the Sky pizza either, but still the ‘country pizza’ was up their. So Kudos to Oklahoma’s pizza’s!

Everybody seemed to be full after 2 slices, which was kind of embarrassing for Paolo and me as we had been working on our appetites for quite a few weeks now and considering we downed a 30” pizza between us, we had to hold ourselves from finishing it off.

Once again I will bore you with my complaints of the heat! It was hot! The temperature today was 105F, I don’t know what that is in real temperature, but it’s hot! And mostly just direct blazing sun and with little to no breeze. We walked around campus to meet a random selection of David Pudies friends; we saw an epic amount of Tailgating! People had managed to lay claim to every open patch of ground and set up some form of BBQ or drinking station in it, all donned in bright orange! And hardly any of these groups were the actual students, mostly it was families and older people, those living in the local vicinity follow the college games here, in majority. To gauge it for you, the stadium seats 75,000 people, the student population is around 25,000 and the population of Stillwater is around 20,000 which means if every single person went it would fill just over half of the stadium, yet every game the tickets sell out! What a following for a college team!

We were not going to the game as the tickets were around $100 a head so that would have meant $600 for the group of us, Paul and his friend David decided instead to go home early instead of staying for the Saturday as something had come up at work and they had to return back.

So instead of dealing with the heat we decided that we needed some rest and recovery ready another night of revel.

Paul had brought up his brothers TV with him and it needed a few cables to have it picture ready so we dropped by Best buy and headed back to his to set it up.

Later on that evening after watching ‘My Best Friends Girl’ on the new TV set up, David’s friend Tony turned up, what a lad! He was just one of those people you feel would add to any social situation. We all got ready and started to drink while we waited for David to finish getting ready, another one of his friends Wendy turned up and added a female element to the so far mostly male interaction we have had thus far in Oklahoma, so it didn’t go amiss.

We got to mine and David’s mutual friends house Tiffany, we had met in Korea at New Years and hit it right off and the previous time we had met, we partied into 2010, so how apt that I was now partying at hers also in 2010!

House party, in America, in Oklahoma, in Stillwater, who would have thought! We got straight into it, jello shots and flip cup was the first call on the house and we evolved through all the standard protocols of these American house parties, Tony and David introduced us to everybody at the party as their English friends, which we were I guess. While there I also ran into my brothers best friend Sam Tindal whom I had met last year, also in Korea.

At the end of the night we made our way to the local drunk food haunt, it’s a place called shortcakes, its open 24 hours a day, and its infamous in Stillwater for serving up generous plates of home cooked foods. Oh also because its been closed down 3 times for food hygiene reasons, and I ponder who let it reopen. There were more bugs (including cockroaches just blatantly on the floor) inside than outside! I don’t know if any sober people ever eat here.

Another brilliant night in the USA!

Oklahoma is a Purdie place!

17^th September,

This was a travel day to Oklahoma, it was going to be a 6 hour drive, we weren’t just going to Oklahoma, we were making our way north of Oklahoma city, a place called Stillwater. We drove for about 2 hours before we decided that we were hungry, after all we hadn’t eaten since Walmart the day before. We decided to find an Applebee’s, we had already had plenty of Mexican and burgers, so we wanted to try something else, and seeing as we didn’t know what Applebee’s was we thought that it would be fine. We drove until we could find one, but we simply couldn’t find one, we decided to pull over at a German Deli that was randomly along the side of the motorway. It was good, it had a proper deli and was serving some real German sausages in rolls, some with a slightly American twist for example BBQ flavoured ones and some with jalapeno’s.

There wasn’t much else to say about the trip up, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of sights to see in Oklahoma. We made our way into Stillwater and met up with David Purdie. It was so good to see him! Missed him a lot, we studies abroad together in South Korea last year, then I met him at Christmas when I went back there. It’s weird but it didn’t feel like we had even been apart, although Paolo was a little left out of some of the stories that we were reminiscing about. With David was his friend Chase, we all went for dinner at a soup place, me and Paolo both had tortilla soup. We proceeded back to Purdies place and we chilled out and met up with another friend of David’s friends called Justin. We started pre-drinking under the pretence that we were going to make our way to another house party, but as the night evolved it soon materialised that we were not going to be able to make it to another party. Davids brother Paul turned up with his friend, also called David, and then drinking games ensued! I’m not going to lie, it got messy and eventually we all passed out in random places around the apartment. It was a top night! I haven’t hung out with Purdie since Christmas and I felt at home hanging out with him again, although this time in Oklahoma. Although some time past midnight David did break out the Korean BBQ and we had bulgogi and chicken! Classic!

Go Cowboys!

Go Cowboys!

Today was the day that we were going to check out America’s football team, the Dallas Cowboys! We had to make our way west of Dallas to Arlington.

The stadium is impressive, it is located right next to the rangers stadium. We made our way round to get tickets to the tour, we were lucky that today the tickets were $10 discounted because we wouldn’t be allowed to walk onto the field, which was fine because we didn’t even think we would be able to do that anyways, so it was only $17. We waited around with the collective of people going on the tour and there was this immensely irritating (and we suspect he was drunk) guy who thought he was a clown and would constantly inturupt the tour guide with some kind of crappy joke.

The stadium is brand new, the tour guide told us that it has the largest arch in the world and the largest retractable roof in the world, we had to correct her that actually Wembley has the record for both of those records. But it did have the worlds largest TV screen, 115 feet! It was ridiculous! This 115f screen is also HD and has 3D capabilities! The Jonas Brothers did a show at the stadium and they managed to hook up a Xbox and played Halo on it! I hate the Jonas Brothers, although to be honest I would have played Pro evo.

The stadium tour was brilliant value for money, it was a 3 hour tour, we took in the whole place, unfortunately most of the hall of fame sections and parts that showed famous trophies and footballs and jerseys went right over our heads.

One part that we could appreciate was the cheerleaders section! Incredible! Check out some of the pictures, but an interesting fact, the cheerleaders only get paid $50 to perform on game day! At that rate I could afford my own team of cheerleaders!

We were loved the tour, still debating wether or not to become a fan. But we made our way over towards the wallmart across the road from the stadium, we still hadn’t eaten today so we went to the hot deli section of Walmart and got ourselves some pizza and friend chicken with potato salad and coleslaw, it was all really nice except the chicken which is some of the worst fried chicken I’ve ever had.

It was around 5pm by now and we had done everything we could think to do in Arlington so we found a mall and wondered around until our showing of The Expendables, it had an ice rink and there were people practicing figure skating so we got some frozen yogurt and burnt up some time, our film started at 8pm. We also watched some ice hockey training which was very entertaining, we picked sides for there practice matches, it was as good as the real thing! They were very good, I support the Guildford Flames and have been to many matches, these were kids playing and they were better than the Guildford Flames.

The Expendables film was top quality! Exactly our type of film, it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than it is, purely action, Stallone is brilliant, great cast! But this isn’t a film review so I’ll stop. We made our way back again for the night to get ready for Oklahoma the day after.

Cowboys and Steak, welcome to America

September 15^th,

We headed to Fort Worth which was about 30 miles west of Dallas, it took around 40 minutes, we were making our way to The Stockyards, a famous historic district that all the cattle trade used to come through back in the day. It is the real deal, cowboys and rodeo’s (which unforuntately were not on when we were there). We got there around 12:30 and we still hadn’t eaten anything for breakfast and also we hadn’t had a proper steak yet in America, let along a Texas steak, so this was our time! We went to search for our lunch, it was a classic place! Check out the pictures, cows heads on the wall and a proper BBQ bit in the back on full display, love it!

We got right down to it, I ordered a Texas T-bone steak with a side of 2 ribs and a chicken thigh and Paolo got a rib steak! Both meals came with bread, a salad and a baked potato. It was brilliant! Oh how we had waited for this steak and oh how it had lived up to our expectations, we had built up the idea of a Texas steak so much in our heads, it was totally worth the wait! Check it out!

It was an brilliant little town, it has kept its old time style, cowboys wondering around the town and we went to all the gift stores. It was so hot, the sun was glaring down and the constant beating heat was draining, luckily we found a booth selling frozen margarita’s so we got a couple and it saw us through for a few more hours, we were waiting around till 4pm because they had the walking of the longhorn bulls.

The roads were closed and cowboys lined the streets as they rounded up the longhorns and recreated what it was like when the stockyards were in full swing, there was only about 30 cows here but back when it was full operational there would be over 3000 cows going through these streets everyday and they would be controlled by no more than 20 cowboys riding up and down the streets.

We were still full from our massive lunches, yet there was also a famous place in the area that we needed to eat at so we were going to save that for dinner, so in order to help us build up an appaetite we went to go see movie called ‘The Other Guys’ classic Will Ferrell! A bit of humor never goes down badly. We made our way back into the stockyards and hit up JC Garcia that was a famous Mexican place, at dinner they only serve two dishes which are their specialities, that is all you can order, either fajitas or enchiladas . It was a bit overrated and Mexican food starts to blend into one, its not all that great, its simply mince meat, lettuce, beans and rice so it is difficult to stand out and this didn’t really.

We made our way home again, it gets dark early here so we made our way back to Dallas and the traffic was terrible so it took us forever to make our way back.