June 29, 2019
My belief that chiropractic is quackery is confirmed
Day Twenty-Nine: Salida, Colorado
We had a nice day off in Salida, which is my favorite place in Colorado EVER. We stayed in the old downtown; apparently there’s a boring area with chain motels and a Wal-Mart out near US 50, but we didn’t go there, so I have no comment about it. I imagine it’s nothing special.
Joy was out before I was, having a leisurely breakfast, checking out the various bike shops, and figuring out how to reduce the weight on her bike by choosing things to send home.
Mid-morning I finally walked outside and explored the town. I stopped for an early lunch at a sandwich shop, and in a while Joy rode up on her bike. How did she know where I was? (Salida is a good-sized town, with lots of places to eat.) Apparently when I pay with a credit card, and the merchant uses the “Square” payment processing system, Joy sometimes receives, via an email, a copy of the receipt. I’m not sure how or why this happens, but it’s slightly disturbing.
Later I got a haircut at “Floyd’s Barbershop”, where the earring-wearing, European-accented, tiny-dog-owning barber confirmed that no, his name was not really Floyd, and that he had borrowed the name from the “Andy Griffin Show.”
Joy and I spent most of the day doing errands separately: She mailed home enough stuff, including her rear panniers, to reduce the weight on her bike by nine pounds, while I bought a new cycling cap, and discarded the old one, which had become the most despised article of clothing I’ve ever owned.
I’ve been bothered for the last month by pain in my left shoulder and arm, and after much prodding from my wife I finally decided to see someone about it, and made my first-ever trip to a chiropractor. As we walked up to the front door of the office, a woman who was standing there with her children asked if we were there to see the chiropractor, who was her husband, and who had walked across the street for a minute. Joy noticed that the woman was wearing a St. Louis shirt, asked her about it, and we learned that the family had recently moved from St. Louis to Salida, that the woman hated living here, missed St. Louis, and even missed the humidity. Joy gave me a meaningful look during this; the woman sounded exactly like me when I moved from Kentucky to Utah in 2009. I also frequently expounded on how much I missed humidity when I lived in the dry west.
The chiropractor returned, did his thing, which had no immediate effect (and, days later, still has had no effect — maybe chiropractic is one of those things you have to believe in, and I’m a natural skeptic), then we walked over to a brewpub, which was inexplicably child-friendly, so I left before ordering food, and walked down the street to a quieter place and had a burrito.
It got too noisy (and family-friendly) for Joy at the Brewpub, so she left after drinking a beer, and we met up at an Italian restaurant, where we sat at the bar, bantering with the amusing bartender. Joy had a steak, and I made what turned out to be an unfortunate decision to have a second large dinner, a half hour after my giant burrito: Lasagna.
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