Anna's

So only one more week left to my Denver part of my journey, and it feels a little sad, for a week goes by quickly, too quickly most of the time.

Friday night saw another big night out in town, this time to a bar opening called 'The loft'. We went in a limo! Even though the limo driver was completely hopeless and drove around in circles for an hour before we finally reached the place! To top it off the limo broke down on the way back so after waiting around for an hour we finally got a taxi. Other than that the club was really nice, the chairs were actually clean and the floors unsticky... yet.

Saturday was rather uneventful apart from a company picnic which resulted in far too many bratwursts! The Germans sure know how to put on a show.

I finally managed to partake in white water rafting on Sunday in an area called Browns canyon along the Arkansas river. It was fun, pretty wet and cold in places but definitely put a smile on my face. The highlight came when two boats piled one of top of another (yes it really was like that), resulting in a swimmer which was eventually picked up by our boat, then few boats took 10 minutes to find the swimmer's bright red crocs. Moral of the day: Don't wear crocs when you're going white water rafting, it'll be $30 down the drain easy. But it was highly amusing, and provided conversation for the rest of the day.

Royal Gorge was the next stop. This is supposedly the highest suspension bridge in the world, standing over 300m above a gorge! The scenery was spectacular, and the engineering to be marvelled at... until you stand on the bridge that is. Then the wooden planks that make up the road begin to feel rather dangerous, especially when I could see all the way down through the giant gaps between the planks. The bridge also sways... brings back memory of first year statics & dynamics when they showed us the pictures of that bridge that was all twisted as an example of torsion, anyone remember that? I wasn't the only one that felt nervous, some boy refused to walk across the bridge half way, standing there looking petrified. But the view was really spectacular. There was this awesome railway that resembled bird cages and went all the way down to the bottom of the gorge at a 45 degree angle. Plus some other world record breaking aerial tram from which the above picture was taken. Although I couldn't stop thinking about whether the cables are able to hold us up.

Left: cage train. Center: from the bottom of the gorge looking up at the railway. Bottom: View from the bottom of the gorge

I can't get the pictures loaded up right. Someone tell me how to use this thing?