The freeway carries on it's familiar hum as we descend from the Rocky Mountains into the Denver valley. We find ourselves in a road-coma as we begin the physical and mental recovery from the last 3 days of brain-melting bass music and craziness at the Sonic Bloom electronic music festival.

Upon breaching the city barrier, we decide to pull over, find a park and further develop our plans of reanimation. While driving towards the nearest park, Meisha's nose suddenly begins to gush blood. We frantically grab any visible absorbent materials and pull over to assess the situation. Meisha's nose has never been a fan of dramatic altitude changes and doesn't seem to appreciate the drop from 10,000 to 5,000 feet.

This little incident is finally enough to convince us to do the unthinkable.

We were ready for a hotel room. Yep. We were dirty, bloody, hungry and exhausted. Yes, we could have tried to find a last-minute couch to surf or just dealt with the situation, but we felt it was finally time to take some alone time and just relax. We find a good cheap hotel and take advantage as much as we can. Swimming, showering and a continental breakfast are much appreciated, yet we still find the experience bittersweet. Meisha sums up those feelings best here.

We decide it's time to find some things to do in this mile-high city and join the Denver Group on CouchSurfing. We receive a warm welcome from the group's moderator (who actually took the time to check out our profile and make the welcome personal). She fills us in on a number of things to do in Denver and let us know about the upcoming weekly CouchSurfing mixer. We procede to spend the next day-and-a-half relaxing, doing laundry and sleeping in parks. Much needed, all of it.

We arrive at the mixer feeling a bit socially awkward, as we so frequently tend to do and are relieved that everyone seems to be so friendly and takes the time to approach and learn about us. We enjoy talking with our various new-found Denver friends. We meet a medical marijuana grower, a brewer, a van-dwelling expert who is currently blogging and cycling his way across the country and many other unique and interesting people.

We ended up spending a week in Denver. We had the pleasure of hanging out, climbing and CouchSurfing with 3 different hosts (the moderator and 2 friends we met while at the mixer). We had a great time rock climbing at Clear Creek, checking out The Art Walk, free day at the Denver Art Museum, The Slut Walk, few local breweries and coffee shops as well as many of the great parks they have around the city.

We can certainly say that we quite enjoyed the Denver atmosphere, people and activities. Hopefully we'll have the chance to return again some day soon...