Black Hawk and coldness

We went to Black Hawk on Friday as a post-thanksgiving trip. It's an old victorian mining town that has been converted to a casino town. It's nice, but there really isn't anything there except casinos and a church! They have 'strict' building regs to try and preserve the Victorian feel of the town.. but strict regs can be loosley applied- I saw an old building that had been completely trashed appart from it's facade, which was being held up by an impressive ammount of steel.
Andy played poker with his boss (he won $140) while I explored the town, amused myself on the vidio machines and drank as much free coke as I could :-). There were some scary people there, feeding token after token into slot machines like robots- it was just like an episode of the Simpsons where marge gets addicted to the slots. I don't see the appeal- they look really dull to play... but the machines are linked together and there is an ever
increasing 'progressive jackpot' of thousands of dollars that I guess they are chasing after.

We were going to stay near Denver and go out there the next day, but Andy wasn't feeling too great so we came home. We made it to Fort Collins instead- and didn't get a flat tire this time.. The road was swamped with blowing snow. The wind pulled the loose powder into the air and sent it drifting accross the road like steam rising from damp tarmac. Whole fields were drowned in snow, like heavy mist. It was eerie. We survived the road and went for Christmas presents and burritos in Fort Collins. Only in America would you drive 70 miles to go to a shopping center...