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So I just returned home from a Spring Break trip to Colorado Springs with my wife to visit some friends.  We had a blast, though I must say the highlight of the trip was our visit to Casa Bonita…

Yes.  That Casa Bonita:

It is indeed a real place.

If you’ve never heard of Casa Bonita or seen the South Park involving it, let me explain.  Casa Bonita is a restaurant/family fun extravaganza in downtown Denver, Colorado.  It includes a meal, cliff diving, gun fights, a spooky cave, two arcades, and all the Sopapillas you can eat.

Our journey into mediocrity began in the evening.  We arrived at Casa Bonita to find that the line was already out the door.  My wife promised me it would be worth the wait so we got in and were handed a menu, which consisted of about 10 items.  When was the last time you went to a Mexican restaurant where there were any less than 250 items on the menu?  We decided to order the All-You-Can-Eat chicken platter.  The line was at least half a mile long on the inside and we were shuffled down hallways, around corners, down more hallways, up inclines, down inclines, around more corners, into more hallways for literally an hour.  It was like waiting in line at Six Flags, which actually, the whole place feels like an old crappy Six Flags ride (like the one with the creepy little dwarven miners…Holy Crap that’s exactly what it’s like).

Once we neared the end of the line, we finally ordered and were shuffled through the line to the feeding troughs…er…the place they hand you the food.  Now don’t get confused, this is in no way Mexican Cuisine.  It’s twelve-dollar-mass-produced-high-school-football-game-concession-stand-food.  I kept waiting for someone to come running by screaming something about Soylent Green being people.

The entire place is divided into what I would describe as “Regions.”  There’s the old mine, the good seats up top where you can actually see other people and the entertainment, and then there’s the place we sat…the cave.  They seated us at the absolute darkest table in the entire restaurant, probably so we wouldn’t be able to see what we were eating.  There are workers wandering around selling toy light sabers, laser guns, and light-up spinner things (because when I think of mexican food, I think of laser guns) so we asked one to hold a light saber over our table so we could see but I don’t think he spoke English so he quickened his step and got the hell out of there.  Then a guy in a gorilla suit walked by non-chalantly which almost convinced me that I had died and gone to hell.

We were unable to see the show from our darkened corner due to the stalagmites and stalagtites (I told you we were in the cave) so instead we got our entertainment from the table behind us which consisted of the following:  two crying children upset that they couldn’t see the poorly acted gunfight, a mother upset that her two children were crying and that the waiters had lost their ticket and their magaritas hadn’t yet arrived, a crying waitress who had gotten an earful from the upset mother with the upset children, and an effeminite manager who tried and failed to fix everything that had been screwed up.

After our craptastic meal, we decided to explore.  We watched the cliff diver, the one impressive thing about the whole place, walked through Black Bart’s Cave, a funhouse that makes me think of Disneyland circa 1955, and visited the gift shop where they sold t-shirts and models of jets.  After about 3 minutes of watching the Gorilla Show (two high school drama kids and the guy in the suit) we decided to leave.

Casa Bonita was a great experience, one that stayed with me much through that night and into the next day and one my body still hasn’t forgiven me for.

You should go.