Denver

We stayed with Chippy near the university. He seemed as harmonious with the tall buildings and craft beers of Denver as he did last time I checked in on him in tiny Atsumi Onsen, perched on a hill overlooking a pile of tetrapods and the Sea of Japan.

We went to a ball game, a completely different experience to the games I went to see in Tokyo Dome. Out another night, Champ and I met a charmingly drunk guy out celebrating his birthday who called a big guy called Jr from Oklahoma on the other side of us a douche-bag. Jr didn't see him so charmingly drunk - cue fireworks. Chippy later informed us it's usually at this point you yell, 'Hit'm!'. I ate a 2lb burrito that sold itself as, 'As big as as your head!' and another evening we shared the most ginormous pizza I have ever beholded and devoured.

We also added one more to the list of National Parks visited and went to the Rockies. It was just as breath-taking and grand in scale as Glacier. Huge swathes of forest lie before roadside vantage points, here and there a solitary dun coloured tree amongst the green and every now and then, a corner turned, an entire hillside of these sick trees or worse, dead, gray trees. Pine beetle is the villain. Refreshingly, the park literature stresses the power of nature and explains their policy of damage limitation and proper forest management (better spacing between trees apparently helps) in the face of something beyond the control of man.