By the time we got out of the movie, the weather had cleared enough for us to get in a couple of nice sport pitches in the Calico Basin, before a dinner with the event sponsors and organizers. In our brief exposure to the sun Kevin and I both picked up a nice burn. To ameliorate the sting of it, Kevin applied a liberal coating of XtremeSkin (xtremeskin.com) to his entire, radish-red face, making it somewhat shiny and giving him a sweaty, feverish, Ebola-like appearance. The salve soothed his pain though, so he kept applying.

After getting lost repeatedly on the way back to the airport, I found I’d missed the 45-minute preflight check-in cut-off, meaning I’d have to wait for the next flight. Unfortunately, it was 9:05 p.m., and mine had been the last of the day, so I was sentenced to a night in the airport for my tardiness. I found a secret power outlet on the upper level near a cigar stand and plugged in my laptop, watching the BBC Special Life in the Undergrowth on DVD until I fell asleep on the hard, carpeted floor next to a friendly Guatemalan man on his way to Oregon.

In the morning I zombied through the maze of barriers to the security checkpoint, feeling as if I’d died and awakened to a purgatory of eternal airport wandering—waiting in lines, drinking Starbucks, and surfing the free Internet until some divine being decided my ultimate fate. Of course I really just swept through the line, boarded the plane, and jetted home. From air there were perfect views of the mountainous desert surrounding Vegas, the red valley-ed vistas of Utah, and the snowfields and razor-backed mountain peaks of Colorado. Not bad. 

Sunny in cool in Boulder today; just another day in the office.