Things I Drank This Week That I Liked

Hi Guys! I went on vacation last weekend so I figured this was the perfect week to talk about two of my favorite things: beverages and archiving useless information about my life for future me.

I think there’s a small subset of society that has been emboldened by La Croix to understand that they are beverage people. Like, people who just come alive at the prospect of a good beverage. For me, personally, life has few things to offer that I’m more interested in than a giant glass of iced beverage. I drink iced americano all winter and I would describe uncarbonated water as viscous. One of my juiciest recurring fantasies is about a particular hurricane I had in New Orleans. This is a beverage person.

Also, as a red-blooded American woman and millennial, I think the timing is always ripe to fuck up your plans for the day and have a joie de vivre moment instead. This is a fancy way of saying if you offer me a beer at 10am I’m going to say yes. If you need a drinking buddy you only have to say something vaguely poetic about bubbles rising to the top of a boiling pot and I’m down to do what you want me to do. Play the Sheryl Crow Song. It works every time. I like to have fun and I hate to miss out. This is probably all the background information you need to know about me in order to consume my drinking diary for the weekend. Here are some things I drank that I liked:

A shot and a beer

This is the first drink I had when I got to the Denver airport at 4pm.

A shot and a beer is my number one favorite drink of all time. This is the perfect drink!!! If I am going to a bar to meet up with someone this is always what I get because it’s the perfect amount of alcohol if you’re nervous, and you get that alcohol delivered to your brain immediately and then you have something to sip on. Plus, it’s a conversation starter and the person you’re meeting will appreciate having something cute to talk about.

I had 2 of these while I was eating dinner and waiting for my friend’s flight to get in. We’d texted ahead of time that she was going to be in charge of driving the rental car because what else are you going to do alone in an airport for two hours but get drunk by yourself and examine your life choices by scrolling through all feeds fervently.

2 bottles of Yellow Tail Cabernet Sauvignon

My friend and I drove from the Denver airport to Estes Park which is kind of a tourist-y mountain town at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. Three cool things about this town: it’s infested with elk, there’s a super famous haunted hotel, and the views are sick. On the way we passed through Boulder, famous home of JonBenét Ramsey (RIP), and stopped to get nice weed (yay) and cheap alcohol (yay). I consumed 2 bottles of this over ~4 nights. It was pretty good. Maybe if I’m sober I can taste the difference with a nicer kind of wine but there’s a rich tapestry of experiences I’m prioritizing over that in my life right now.

Many glasses of $5 happy hour wine

When I see people doing things on vacation I get exhausted. I go on vacation to lay around and gossip with my friends the same way we do at home, only in a much more beautiful location. On this vacation I wandered around a mountain town looking at shops and galleries until I wanted a break and then I could read my book (Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman — it’s okay) and drink.

I feel like a $5 happy hour wine is basically free. Imagine not ordering that wine! I feel like the whole point of life is to sit at a beautiful table and drink a glass of wine. My personal heaven could possibly be just playing all those afternoons and all those wines back over and over. I can’t imagine a scenario in which the life experience of having drank that wine was not worth $5.

A horror themed IPA in a haunted hotel

My friend and I had dinner at the whiskey bar at the Stanley Hotel which is super beautiful and super haunted. Stephen King stayed there and had a paranormal experience and sat down and started writing The Shining. You can read more about it here. I ordered a local beer that has a Shining theme so I could take a photo of it for Creepy Catalog. It was great but I ended up regretting not ordering a whiskey.

Heinekens in a hot tub, under the lunar eclipse

This place is such a tourist town that all the shops are just closing whenever. When we were driving home I saw a liquor store about a mile from our cabin and I thought it would be a good way to wind down to walk there and get something cold and refreshing to drink in the hot tub that night while we watched the lunar eclipse/crazy blood moon. So I walked there a mile in the cold and it was closed. Luckily there was a gas station that sold beer, so I bought these and they WERE refreshing in the hot tub and the blood moon WAS crazy, so everything was a success.

—

I also had six total drinks in first class flying to and from Denver. I got first class tickets because I bought the trip on miles and for some reason it was really cheap to upgrade to first class. It was my first first class experience and the first thing I learned is that they will serve you a drink as soon as you sit down but you have to drink it before the plane takes off or else they will take it away. You can use this to your advantage! It’s almost like ordering a shot and a beer which I think would be frowned upon in first class.

There’s no pic for this one because I was trying to be classy!!! Tune in at some random future date for your next installment of Things I Drank This Week That I Liked.