My favorite movie will always be Dumb & Dumber, which is a comedy starring Jim Carrey (as Lloyd Christmas) and Jeff Daniels (as Harry Dunne) as two half-wits who drive from Rhode Island to Aspen, Colorado, to deliver a briefcase to a woman who had left it in the lobby of an airport. Lloyd was her airport limousine driver, and he had developed a crush on her at first sight. (“Why you going to the airport? Flying somewhere?” was his first attempt at flirting with her.) Lloyd had no idea he had taken a briefcase full of ransom money left for the kidnappers of the woman’s husband.
I remember seeing the movie in the theater with a friend while I was in junior high school—the perfect age to be enraptured by a movie full of sophomoric humor. My friend and I had each smuggled a can of Coca-Cola into the theater. I remember not being able to keep a sip down because of all the laughing.
At the beginning of the movie, Harry and Lloyd were lamenting that they had both been fired from their jobs that day when Lloyd announces: “We’ve gotta get out of this town!”
“And go where? Where we gonna go?”
“I’ll tell you where,” Lloyd assures Harry. “Someplace warm. A place where the beer flows like wine. Where beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano. I’m talking about a little place called Assspen.”
Since seeing that movie as a teenager, I’ve always wanted to make my own (less idiotic) pilgrimage to Aspen. So, when my friend Mark invited me to join him and his seven-year-old son skiing there, I quickly said yes.