Laramie, Wyoming might honestly be the coldest, dead piece of earth to which we had ever been. When we got there, the place was covered in snow and was nothing but howling winds. We had a few interesting things happen in this town, but the place was especially fun for ChadM.
After pulling into town - despite blizzard warnings and closed roads saying to stay away from Laramie - we headed to a local grocery store to get some lunch. ChadM got his stuff and headed through the checkout where this little old lady was ringing people up. She didn’t speak very loudly, so when she asked ChadM a question, he didn’t hear her, and didn’t respond. I guess this made her mad, so she yelled at him and called him Pee Wee. I laughed incredibly hard, but ChadM was pissed for hours after we left, and honestly wanted to go back and fight with the little old lady. I calmed him down, though.
The Suicide Denial has this secret hobby of ghost hunting. We take cameras and little recorders to strange places in between shows and working in studios, and catch disembodied voices. We were hoping to do some ghost hunting that night in Laramie, but arranging a ghost hunt in old buildings at the last minute, late at night isn’t easy to do. We opted for going geo-caching in the middle of the night with a local instead. Geo-caching is when you take a GPS, get some coordinates off the internet, and look for pointless crap hidden in fields or wherever.
We followed the GPS to some area on the outskirts of the University of Wyoming, and got out of the car to start looking. The fact that whatever we were looking for was probably buried under 7 feet of snow never crossed our minds. Once outside the car, we realized (while wearing only our hoodies) how incredibly cold it was. We’re talking like below zero. Still, ChadM and I are troopers, so we forged on.
Knee deep in snow, we walked in circles looking for this stupid thing, and with each second of our search, the wind picked up and blizzard conditions increased. I have no idea how long we were out there, but finally we gave up. I called our local Laramie contacts on my cell, and told them to pull around and find us. Once they came into sight, we sprinted the best we could through the frozen tundra down to the warm car. After getting inside, ChadM realized he lost his freakin’ phone somewhere out in the hills. I tried to talk him out of looking for it, but it was hopeless.
We jumped back outside, and were basically geo-caching once again, but this time for his stupid cell phone. It wasn’t even a cool phone, by the way. As our faces burned from high speed snowflakes hitting our juicy skin, the local dude and I lost hope, and tried to talk ChadM into leaving his fallen phone behind. I yelled through the wind, “There’s nothing we can do, he was a good phone, but we can’t help him now. He’s on his own!” Still, ChadM didn’t lose hope, and came up with the idea to have me call his phone. I did, and sure enough, a patch of snow glowed blue through the dark blizzardy night.
The next morning on our way out of Laramie, heading to Denver, we had to pull over because a door flew open, and we almost lost some of ChadM’s kit. He got out (still blizzarding) and the wind blew his hat across the freeway. He immediately ran after it, and was almost hit by a semi before reaching the center median to get his hat.
My only regret after entering that town under extreme blizzard conditions is that we didn’t make a webisode of the adventure. Since then, we film and post everything.
