If you read my blog yesterday you might remember that Juliet and I are holed up in a shit-hole called Extended Stay America in Lakewood, CO. Juliet's company put us up here while they help us to find a short-term lease for the next 13 weeks. I have stayed at numerous extended stays on some of my extended stays around the country and I have always found them sparse but clean and easy to manage.

This Extended Stay is easily the rattiest hotel I have ever stayed in a 1st world country. My jungle hut in Vietnam was the Ritz f-in Carlton compared to this pit. Nevertheless, I will save the smoky details and just send a few shots of our first and possibly only dinner at the ESA Lakewood.

Considering the circumstances: our exhaustion from an all-night drive and trying to take advantage of the low-rent proceedings, we decided to picnic it for the Sperbowl. We stayed in our room and watched the game on an old throwback TV while enjoying our smoky non-smoking room circa 1986. It was like being in a college dive bar without the longneck beers and the hard livin' men and women (they were likely in the surrounding hotel rooms).

The best part about our Super Bowl was the lovely Venison Summer Sausage my dad gave us for the road that was too frozen to eat on our journey to Denver, and was exceptionally temperate by game-time. We enjoyed that with a couple of wonderful cheeses from Italy and Austria on some gluten-free rice crackers and drank a bottle of Aglianico del Vulture I picked up at the local Wine shop for $9.99

This was going to rock of course and especially when we realized we had no wine glasses nor a corkscrew so I had to hustle the wine shop chick for 2 cheap beer glasses and a discount on a nice wine opener to throw in with my other 20 when I get our stuff from storage. Another 9 bucks down and this was getting to be an expensive shit-hole Superbowl picnic.

As fate would have it, the sausage rocked, the cheeses were solid, and the f-in wine was corked. I served it a little too cold so the TCA only hit about mid-bottle. I basically threw in huge mouthfuls of cheese and meat and kind of washed it down with Mr Corky as I needed the buzz without regard to the olfactory torture I would endure.

The cool glow of the tube made for such a nice light to display my sausage while chugging down corked wine in a beer glass[/caption]

In the end, valuable lessons were learned.

1. Never agree to allow a third-party to book a hotel room for you

2. Never purchase less than 2 bottles of wine at any time for any reason

Ciao,

M