Tour Stop: Telluride, CO

You may remember way back in September, I made a teaser post about my upcoming job. It basically consisted of nothing but a picture of a small town nestled among towering mountains, indicating that this would be one of the destinations of the mystery job. That town was Telluride.

I had my concerns about taking this job -- the timing wasn't great, I wasn't sure if being on the road was the best thing for me at the moment, I wasn't sure how I felt about doing a play. But when I saw pictures of Telluride I became more convinced that this was an experience that would be about more than "x" amount of dollars for "x" amount of work for "x" amount of weeks. I've always wanted to go to the Southwest, and this tour spends a pretty good deal of time there. So as I think I've said before, this leg of the tour is the one I have been looking forward to most.

The drive from our last venue in Baton Rouge to Telluride was a very long one (about 1,400 miles), with a day spent at a crappy hotel beside a highway in Wichita Falls, TX, while Bart got his sleep. We then pulled out around 11PM and drove for 14 hours straight to Telluride. Most of us were awake before 10AM, anxious to wake up and get out to the front lounge to see as much of the scenery as possible. It was really beautiful and fascinating. We passed a lot of isolated ranches with some cattle or horses. Very rarely did we see any people except the occasional car coming in the opposite direction. At one point we stopped briefly at the side of the road where some horses were grazing down a hill. After a few minutes we realized that all the horses had kind of gathered together to stare at us. I guess if you were a horse in the middle of the Rockies and some noisy giant gold tube-like thing stopped a few hundred meters in front of you, you'd probably wonder what it was. So Joel opened the window, stuck his head out and flipped them off. That seemed to confuse them more.

The drive was mostly on narrow roads with one lane going in each direction, with lots of twists and turns. Stuff was flying all over the bus. Pretty much every few seconds, someone was catching something falling off a table or countertop. Someone's coffee thermos thing must have fallen off the kitchen counter at least four times. I think it took me a half hour to get dressed and ready in the morning because I kept having to stop what I was doing to hold on. Thankfully the bathroom isn't that big, so there wasn't really anywhere to fall to. Tonight when we leave I am going to make sure everything in the kitchen and front lounge is stowed somewhere where it can't fall over, since we will be asleep for the reverse trip. With all this going on in the bus, we wondered how our truck was faring. Thankfully because we had loaded it on an incline, it had more load straps between items than it normally would, but we still managed to demolish one edge of a flat, and had some pipes come loose from their cart.

The cast had a tight schedule for their arrival in town, and actually arrived later than their required hour-and-a-half rest period before half hour, so we had to get dinner ready for them at the theatre.  The venue very kindly provided an oxygen tank for them, since they had not had any time to adjust to the altitude.  I really think any place where you need an oxygen tank in your dressing room just to breathe properly is probably not the best place to do theatre, but it sure is beautiful.

Some photos from our drive:

The dots in the sky are not UFOs, just the reflections of the overhead lights on the bus.

The load in situation was kind of crazy.  In a addition to not being provided with sufficient oxygen for physical activity, there was no dock, and a large downhill slope leading to the loading door.   Having loaded the truck in Baton Rouge on a slope, we had no desire to unload it on an even steeper one, so we parked the truck flat at the top of the hill and then pushed the stuff down the ramp, and then down the hill.  It was actually not as hard as it seemed at first.  And somehow, under those conditions, the Telluride crew broke the record for load-out set by the Baton Rouge crew, who had the advantage of a full dock.  They also did it without gasping for breath, as all of us were!

I had a really hard time adjusting to the image of giant picturesque mountains as the backdrop everywhere we turned.  I realized that I don't think it's at all special or unusual to see the Empire State Building sticking up down the street, but the idea of seeing a mountain is completely insane.

View from the gondola over the mountains: