The Shots and Travels of Nevko
Vagabonding around Colorado and Elsewheres
Corporate: Jet Setting
Jul 8th
Stuck outside for now
Corporations. What’s it like being absorbed into the money making life fuel that powers the capitalist machine? OK enough of the ramblings of the economic versifier, let talk about JETS!. Yeah, jets. Jets are the power toys of the Corporate elite. They are marketed to a couple different groups of clientele. First, you have the typical rich person who desires the need to fly to their different homes, vacations spots, or to Italy for dinner. Next are the competitive CEO types, which amounts to a basic pissing contest between one another of who got the biggest baddest toys. Lastly is my favorite the globe trotting playboy, a man who needs the means to fly to exotic locals, to sweep away gorgeous vixens.
I’d like my experience was the latter, because that would make a much better story. However, my
My plane awaits for me
experience was with the ordinary corporate jet. Last week, my friend Alison needed dropped off at the airport. I was volunteered (no, I did not say “I volunteered”) to drive her to the airport, because everyone had other “stuff” to do at 7 AM on their day off for the 4 of July (I am superfriend). But little did the others know what they would miss.
As I picked up Alison early in the morning, still groggy from (accidentally) watching back to back flicks culminating with IMAX transformers (very good, rawr, Megan Fox) the night before, I learned that I not going to the commercial airline terminal, but instead I am headed to the Corporate Jet Center. I was instantly awakened from my half eyed slumber. I pulled into the jet terminal, only to see barb-wire fence stopping me from driving right on to the tarmac. My hopes were slightly dashed. However, curiosity pushed me further. We went inside to check-in, and low and behold the pilot was just hanging out drinking some coffee. I could tell right off the bat this was a chill dude. He noticed that we were early, and after some sweet talking, he asked if we wanted to check out the plane. I definitely had a mental high-five moment at this point. Walking on to the terminal and beside the hanger, this is what I basically saw.
| Ludacris – Area Codes (Beware.) |
The red carpet
The jet was seriously plush – complete with the red carpet rolled out for me. Immediately I noticed the personalized initials on the wings and tail, they exuded classiness and I could have sworn they really formed a capital N (for nevko, duh). As soon as I boarded the jet, I was immediately graced with a fully stocked bar. Including champagne (no Andre here), the finest liquors, and tuna for the in-flight meal. The cabin had fine wood inlay and flush mounted lcd tvs. Unknowingly, I took a seat in “the BOSS’S” chair. Man this chair was awesome. I think there was more cushion in that seat, than all the lazyboys in the world. For a few moments, I felt naturally at home, like a BOSS.
Taking control of the Cockpit
After talking with the pilot and co-pilot for awhile, they convinced me to checkout the cockpit. Always sucker for people in uniform (ladies hint hint), I was instantly swayed. This thing was like a real-life flight simulator. All the knobs, buttons, levers, and pedals were all there. I definitely played with yoke and rudders, which made me think of changing careers. Then the pilot came in and started up the engines. Immediately, all the gauges came to life making this a truely real experience. After having my fun, I decided to figure what use this plane actually gets. From what I gathered, the owners normally fly to 3 places; Aspen, Maimi, and Italy, and the flight from COS to ATL normally takes about 2.5 hrs. This thing was a cruiser and the owner where apparently very unassuming about being extensively well to do.
That pretty much rapped up my 1st experience on a corporate jet. I hope its not the last. I’ll leave you with some specs of this machine.
| Name: Falcon 2000
Manufacturer: Dassault-Falcon Speed: Mach .8 Capacity: 8 seats. (lots of leg room) Range 3,800 nautical miles. Price: $20,000,000 |
 Plane in Flight |
 The fully stocked bar. |
 Umbrella Storage- very important. |
 Flight Manual |
 Alison boarding |
 Plushness at it best |
 The cabin |
 The Boss |
 Gauges off |
Allison getting sucked into an engine |
 Full power, clear runway A-1 |
 Throttle up |
 Dodads and switches |
The Tourist Experience to RMNP
Jul 5th
Verns C-Rolls
After Brewfest(around 8PM), we decided to camp for the night. So Dave led the drive into the Mountains to find somewhere to camp. We setup shop at the top of the cell-tower road overlooking the town of Ft. Collins. We hike several yards down into the woods and found a sweet spot. We immediately went to camp ‘readiness mode’. Dave setup the tents, the girls went about gathering a huge amount of firewood, and I “the master of fire” made of huge fire ring out of all the near by boulders. Within 15 Min’s camp was setup, a roaring fire was flickering about, and food was being cooked. We feasted, watched stars and passed out on a nice cool evening.
Being Prey'd on
The next morning, we went to Vern’s Place for breakfast. Vern’s was an awesome restaurant. First of all, its first come first serve. There is no hostess to seat you. You have to rush and claim a table before someone else does. Secondly is the huge amount of stuffed dead animals on the wall. This look is exactly how I want my house to look like in the future. Third is the Vern’s Huge Famous Cinnamon rolls. These were the most delicious and ridiculous cinnamon rolls that I have ever eaten (sorry Dad, yours were semi-close). Each one was the size of a dinner plate. Vern’s Place looks like a hole in the wall from the 1930′s because it is and that’s what makes it awesome. It was built to support the workers constructing the nearby Horsetooth Reservoir.
After our pleasant breakfast, we took off to RMNP (Rocky Mountain Nation Park) because Dave and Katie, have never been. I suggested we do the quick driving tour of the park since it was Sunday and we eventually need to get back to COS. RMNP on the weekends is definably a tourist trap. Everyone is out to enjoy nature from the the comforts of their cars. Basically, RMNP allows people to see animals and majestic view with great ease.
On some of the pull overs, Dave and I came to the realization that it is great fun make other people’s mothers nervous. We did our best to be adventurous/bad influences to little kids that could only standby and watched us hop safety barriers, climbing on rock cliffs, and other sorts of tumultuous activities. It was great fun to hear the whispers of mothers saying to their kids, “now, don’t you ever, ever, ever do that.” But I think the kids saw how much more fun we were having and break their mothers wishes.
I also decided the traffic was becoming a problem on ridge road. So I built a snowman traffic cop in the center of the road to stop all the driving infractions. People seemed to not heed the snowman attempts at civil order, and instead decided to start taking picture with it. That snowman was terrible enforcing order.
RMNP is a great place to go if you want to check out what the Rocky Mtns are about, but only have a day to do so. Below are some more pictures from the trip.
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- Being Prey’d on
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- Verns C-Rolls
The BrewFest of Fort Collins
Jul 2nd
Waiting in Line
Looking back at the Lines. Lots of Thirsty People
After having our ids check several times, we were allowed to proceed and a purchase tokens for beer. One token equaled one beer, but we soon learned several tricks to make our tokens go a little bit further. There were three techniques to be exact.
- The fake dunk method ( Slight of hand showing the motion of place the token in the bucket)
- The token snap procedure (break the token and ‘wallah’ you have two tokens now to place in the bucket)
- The booty short-shorts approach (proposed by Dr. D-Money PHD. MB. OW.)
Unoffical Map of the Event
The day was hot and sunny, which made everyone bring out the shorts, skirts and sunglasses. I will have to say that this was one of the largest gathering of scenester sunglasses that I have seen since opening day at A-basin or the Lovefest of Califorina. I saw multiple copies of my old sunglasses, which I now cannot wear anymore. However, I was prepared that day and brought along my newest sunglasses to try and maintain my freshness.
Since we around at Brewfest at noon, the sun was extremely hot and bright (the altitude is killer). Derek, Will, and I decide now would be the best time to breakout our special shorts. This was a great call because our knees were getting really sweaty.
Knees were no longer sweaty
Yum .. Free
However to our surprise, people were not accustom to our shorts. People were shy to this idea so we decided to go on a goodwill mission and make as many new friends as possible and open some minds. People’s reactions fell into into one of two categorizes, of either amazement or jealously. The mission started off alittle weird. People would passed and do a double or triple take, but since it was our job to open minds to the world of man shorts again, we would let out our battle cry, “Hey, don’t worry… Looks are free”. After hearing that people knew that it was ok to come closer and see what this was all about. After awhile, we recruited several other dudes, who wanted to join our short-shorts crusaded. They would proceed to roll their shorts up to free the cool breeze on there knees. I believe we forever changed their lives.
The shorts also got us lots of free drinks for some reason. I do not know why, but almost all of or free drinks came from girls. I guess they were supportive in our ideals that short-shorts are just not for girls anymore. End the double standard. A couple girls were definitely jealous that our shorts were shorter and got more attention than theirs.
We made lots of friends that day, including a cop or two, and I
think we open some doors for some people to a brave new world.
-Thank you, Brewfest (the State College of CO)
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Girls, got us drinks |
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Wayback Wednesday #1
Jun 24th
So on Wednesdays (every now and then) , I’m going to try and give a little story about a past adventure. For the first installment, I thought I’d talked about one of my first climbs on a 14er (14,000ft mt.) in Colorado.
The Roof was quite comfy to sleep on
Now my memories is a bit fuzzy on the detail of the trip, as it occurred back in the summer of 2007, during my initial internship out in Colorado. I met up with my friend Ben from, Boulder, Co, and couple of his buddies. We head to southern Colorado, to a mountain called “Mt. Blanca”. Mt Blanca is located just south of the Sand-Dunes in Colorado and is surrounded by several other 14er neighbors, “Little Bear”, “Ellingwood Point” and “Mt. Lindsey”.
The start of the journey
At the start of the trip, we slept at the foot of the trail and mountain. Early in morning(around 4-5AM) we took off to trek a extreme 4×4 trail to the next base camp. The trail was very rugged and tretrous at parts. Narrow drop offs, epic views, and abandon cabins littered the trail as you continue to climb higher and higher into the air.
We setup base camp at around 11,800 feet, after starting out at 8,000ft and traveling about 7 miles. Base camp was great. It had such majestic views and tranquil surroundings. The part that I enjoyed the most, was wandering around and exploring old cabins and abandon gold mines. After camp was setup, we decided to continue along and try to ascend the rest of Mt. Blanca in one day (tough feat, about 10 miles one way).
The second leg was extremely beautiful. Alpine lakes, craggy rocks, and the tease of fog hiding our final destination. We had about 2,500ft left to go. Some of the views are just speechless….(see below)
Never the less the trip was cut short when we were 100ft from the top. An extreme lightning storm swept and destroyed any hope of making it to the top that day. We decided that not being lit up was a better choice than claiming the ascent. So we went back the 3 miles to base camp and made some dinner and slept. I was hit with a bit altitude sickness, so I didn’t get to climb it again the next morning. But the others in my group got the chance.
I hope to make it back there some day and conquer Little Bear. It is said to be the hardest 14er there is.
 Panorama |
 View from Base Camp |
 Abandon Cabin |
 Alpine Waterfall |
 Back towards base camp |
 Looking back at the valley we traveled up |
 View from the knife's edge |
 Alittle Alpine Champange Celebration |
 The edge of the storm |
The Quick and Dirty Rafting Trip
Jun 23rd
“Let jump right into this”, these words are not only referring to my first real blogging experience, but to events that will occur later on in this post. Not many photo’s were taken to highlight the different aspects of the trip, but they do give a good sense of the wacky experience.
The day started out calmly enough in a typical erratic fashion. A 6AM wake, which turned into a 8AM rush to get to Fort Carson. We were making sure to use our buddy Derek’s connections to the Army. Fort Carson supplies discount adventure outings to military employees, but rarely get used. So we decided to exploit help employee these services, will continue to do so in the future.
So a bus full of hungover and rambunctious young-en’s headed to Canyon City. Canon City is known as the commercial white water capital of Colorado. By far it is the most rafted river in Colorado. Another factoid of Canyon City is that it is the Incarceration Capital of Colorado ( maybe the west?) including, several federal penitentiaries, country jails, and a super max prison. However, I’ll save this for another day.
Badass Rafting Group
The part of the river we were rafting was Big Horn Sheep Canyon, known for the incredible amount of promiscuous sheep that frequent the canyon. We put-in alongside a couple other groups of rafting hippies (otherwise know as river rats). We dawned our rafting apparel, played a game of Frisbee, and stood for the initial badass pose. The water being a balmy 50* degrees (fresh snow melt, yum) we decided to keep our wet suits on (except Sean, who want to show off his Hawaiian surfing calves).
Raft Master Dave, AKA Sweet Dude
Our rafting guide, Dave turned out to be a super cool dude, and by far we were the awesomest boat crew of the trip. Dave proceeded to tell us all sort of jokes, which became more racier and naughtier the further we drifted downstream. Blonde jokes , Irish jokes, and some “I dare not menton” jokes were had and maybe enjoyed.
Rapid Floating Downstream, Ain't nothin
So down the river we went, destroying class III rapids, nomming class IV. The river was no match for the prowess of the seasoned 8-man crew. Past dead dog tree (named because it had no “bark” , haha?), over the Sharks Tooth, and pounded by Fluffy Muffin (funny story there), the river was not ready for us. Then came the swimming portion. At this point, Dave said ,half-jokingly, that we could get out and enjoy some of the refreshing Rock Mtn water and rapids. Never before had he seen his entire crew completely desert the raft and launch into water of their own free will. Pushing, tackling, and diving ensued; leaving Dave to float downstream without a crew. After floating through some rapids and swimming with the fishes, everyone climbed back in and we said jokingly that it was practice, and that practice made perfect.
Air Jordan!! (river style)
We took a break at a rock cliff and did some free form diving/cactus jumping. The jump was approximately 15-20 at its highest point, and about 10 at the lowest, we would not let anyone jump from the lowest spot, which would have resorted to some severe name calling. As is true with any extreme sport, style was key.
Sean adrift.... 'Forward 2...."
Numerous jumps and chilled bones later, we proceed downstream. Sean wanted to ride the bull ( sit on the front, of the boat through rapids) so he hopped up front and sat down. He took some pictures and readied for the ride. While he was waiting, everyone else silent agreed and nodded that he wasn’t going to be in the boat much longer. I then continued to body-check Sean out of the raft, and everyone watched/waved to him as he floated downstream. Looking for help and feeling betrayed he asked another boat for help. Their reply was “forward 2…” and proceed to paddle away leaving Sean a drift and cold. The one other causality on the trip was Paul, who fell out of the boat of his own free will, while we were spinning on a flat section of water, very very odd. After numerous punishment oars to the face we decided to pull him back in.
We landed at a beach and disrobed our wet gear, excited that we would be eating soon. However one thing remained, the manly picture of the day. The studliest group of rafters that that river has ever seen and probably ever will see posed in triumphant success.
The half day trip was over and we packed up the van. Satisfied that we had a new friend, Dave the Raft Master, we headed back to COS. We decided to saved the royal gorge for another day, which is were real extreme rafting beings. Next time…….
Left to right: Dave C, Michelle, Raftin Dave, Alison, Sean, Paul (me up front and Derek snapping the pic)