Nick and I drove to Colorado last Thursday. Lawrence is about nine hours away from Denver, and a large portion of the drive is comprised of the brown, flat stretches of Western Kansas. The eastern half of Kansas is actually fairly hilly, but by the time you get to Abilene, it's as if an overindustrious giantess has taken a rolling pin to the countryside. There are a few Points of Interest along I-70, such as the enormous replica of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" that can be seen from the highway in Goodland. The painting is on a huge easel that is taller than the surrounding buildings, and its presence completely throws off the scale of things, much as if you were to look into an ant farm and see a fingernail-sized Margaret Thatcher. There is also the World's Largest Prairie Dog, which is actually an enormous cement statue in a barn. As if that were not enough, this roadside attraction also boasts a living six-legged steer and a shop selling homemade rattlesnake jewelry.

You don't see the mountains for about an hour past the Colorado border. You always think you're imagining it the first time you glimpse them. There's just a suggestion of something at the horizon—the faintest outline of an inverted cone—but it could easily be a streak of dust on your windshield, or the luminous residue from some unfortunate insect's final trajectory. You tell yourself it can't be the mountains. For someone living in the Flatlands, it's too strange and beautiful to be believed. And then when you are sure, when the outline becomes clearer and those gargantuan piles of jagged rock are looming ahead of you like Greek Titans, you want to wedge your foot down on the accelerator and fling yourself toward them as fast as your little car will take you. But you don't, because the highway patrol cars in Colorado are more plentiful than deer and cattle and tourists and Big Horn sheep combined.

We rolled into town around 6 at night and tracked down our hotel in Aurora. Aurora is a suburb on the east side of Denver, and it's where our friends Ron and Brandi live. Being a mile closer to the sun, Denver is the land of deceptively easy sunburns. See, in Kansas, you don't have to worry about sunscreen unless the air is warm. But in Denver, you can have the peculiar experience of feeling chilly, even as your skin crisps up like yesterday's fried chicken. The sky is also much bluer, because there's less atmospheric gunk between you and the sun and the diffusion of light is different. The clouds look crisp and white, and they remind you of the anthropomorphic clouds you see on ancient maps—the ones that are illustrated with eyes, puffed-out cherubic cheeks, and little swirly lines that indicate the wind issuing from their mouths.

I love the near-total absence of humidity. My hair never felt better.

Nick and I drove up to Estes Park one afternoon, and man does the altitude make a difference. It had been about 15 years since either of us had been to Colorado, and neither of us recalled having been affected physically by the thin air. This inter-geographic resilience must be the special purview of children, because for a grown-up traveling from Kansas to 7,000-plus feet above sea level, things start to get wacky. After walking up and down the main drag, we were exhausted. As much as I exercise, I didn't expect to have issues with fatigue—nevertheless, there we were eating overpriced pizza and feeling as stiff as if we'd just spent the night out on the Arctic tundra. We drank a good deal of water, but we still felt dehydrated. It didn't help that Nick pointed out that our problems were caused by a lack of oxygen. "Our bodies are slowly suffocating," he said cheerfully. Yeah. Thanks, honey.

Tags: travel