After a few days of being nursed back to health by my little sister in a heat-baked AirBnB with no air conditioning, I graduated to the next phase of the trip.
Sarah had a conference at the Montage resort. This was the plan so I stuck to it.
The Montage
This place was bougie as hell.
I want to be precise about that. It wasn't just expensive — plenty of places are expensive. This was the kind of resort where everything is slightly too perfect, where the staff address you by name before you've told them what it is, and where the lobby smells like money and sandalwood.
I walked in wearing elastic band shorts, flip flops, and a Trillium Brewing t-shirt.
For the uninitiated, Trillium is a local craft brewery out of Boston. Excellent beer. Not, it turns out, the standard resort attire at the Montage.
I walked around. I had some food. I found a fireplace that was roaring — an actual, full-sized, crackling fireplace — in the middle of what was an already warm day. The air conditioning in that room must have been working hard enough to pay its own salary. Someone had decided that the vibes required a fire, and the energy bill was someone else's problem. Fair enough. I sat next to it for a while. It was the most comfortable I'd been since the crash.
The Boston Contingent
The Trillium shirt attracted attention.
Two separate people — at different points during the day, no connection to each other — approached me and asked if I was from Boston.
I said yes.
They told me where they were from.
Neither of them named a place that was Boston. Or particularly near Boston.
I said, as pleasantly as I could: "So… not Boston."
We did not become friends. I think that was the right outcome for everyone. Rich tools are better left to their own devices.
The Eccentric Millionaire Theory
Sarah and I met for dinner. I told her I felt completely out of place. Broken wrist, wrong clothes, wrong tax bracket, wrong everything.
She put her fork down and looked at me with the kind of calm authority that little sisters develop specifically to deploy on older brothers in moments like this.
"Just own it," she said. "Play the part of the eccentric millionaire and have fun with it. You'll fit right in."
She was, as it turned out, completely right.
The eccentric millionaire doesn't worry about the dress code. The eccentric millionaire has a broken wrist and a Trillium shirt because he does what he wants. The eccentric millionaire orders the overpriced food and the overpriced drinks and treats the whole thing as his natural habitat.
I committed to the bit.
The Taste-Off
Emboldened by my new persona, I decided the evening called for a whisky comparison. The resort had High West Campfire on the menu — a Utah whisky, locally appropriate, a blend of straight rye, straight bourbon, and blended Scotch with a peated malt component. An interesting dram. A conversation starter.
I ordered it alongside a Lagavulin 16.
A true champion.
It wasn't much of a competition, if I'm honest. Lagavulin 16 is Lagavulin 16. It's the benchmark for a reason. That deep, medicinal, seaweed-and-smoke profile that just sits there being completely confident in itself.
But I want to give High West its due — it was punching above its weight. The blend is clever, the smoke is present without being a gimmick, and for a Utah whisky at a Utah resort it acquitted itself with dignity.
Lagavulin 16 for the win, though. No contest.
In the end I was the real winner, sitting by an unnecessary fireplace in my finest Utah convalescent wear, drinking good whisky, with a broken wrist and absolutely nowhere to be.
The Red-Eye Home
I stayed one more night. By then the accumulated toll of the head injury, the sleepless heat-wave nights, and several days of operating on one functional wrist had started to catch up with me.
I got on the red-eye back to Boston.
Broken. Tired.
Worth it?
That's the Utah trip. Mike, if you're reading this — you did great. The crash was entirely my fault. You showed good form right up until your riding partner became a casualty. We'll do it again. Maybe at a lower elevation.