Shobhit and I did not get home from Denver last night until about 9:15 p.m. -- our flight took off at 6:11 Mountain Time, which was 5:11 Pacific, which means that between takeoff and actually getting in the door at home, it took about four hours. I suppose that's not bad if you think about it, except they always want you at airports two hours early, which takes that four hours to six . . . and if you add another hour for getting to the airport on transit, that stretches it to seven, door-to-door. And for Shobhit and me it was more like eight, as we kind of ran out of things to do in downtown Denver and so we caught the A Train from Union Station at around 2:00 in the afternoon, and were to the airport roughly around 3:00, getting us there closer to three hours early.

And in spite of more than half the day yesterday being dedicated to some element of the travel home, we did more significant things yesterday than the two previous days combined. That is, at least when measured by the number of photos taken: the Denver trip on the whole, with three Flickr photo albums separated by day, yielded 166 photos total that I kept (and did not delete); with 46 shots for Saturday, 44 for Sunday and 76 for yesterday, Monday's photos alone number nearly as many (okay, 84%) as Saturday and Sunday combined. This is really mostly because of the tour of the Colorado State Capitol we took yesterday, for which I have 32 photos alone. I also took 11 photos at the United States Mint, which was a kind of surprising lot of them given that their public tours are currently closed and I could only get photos of the building exterior and the gift shop.

Anyway, I'll get back to all that. I should start with Saturday.

The Saturday photo album for Denver can be found here; it covers the only day we were there when Sara was able to spend all that much time with us. Unlike what she thought her schedule would be when I booked the trip, when she was still working at a job she recently quit, she is now training to be a store manager at a natural and organic foods grocery store in Denver, and as a result she had Saturday off, but had to work both Sunday and Monday. When I booked it, I was under the impression she would have Sunday and Monday off. She was kind of understandably not interested in driving all the way out to the airport -- which is 25 miles from downtown Denver -- but she did compromise and meet us halfway: she lives in Thornton, a suburb north of Denver proper, and she offered to pick us up at Union Station downtown.

This very much simplified our transit options out of the airport, as based on all the trip planners I found online, depending on the time we left the airport, we could take two buses into Thornton and bypass any part of the main city of Denver, or take the A train downtown and transfer to a #12 bus that goes mostly straight north into Thornton. Either way the trip would be somewhere between 51 and maybe 75 minutes on transit. The A train straight from the airport to Union Station downtown merely took about 40.

And so, Sara picked us up there, which was very nice of her. And as the Saturday photo album covers, she walked us a few blocks over to the Tattered Cover bookstore, and then we walked a few blocks back to Wynkoop Brewing Company for a drink, where I had perhaps the best hard cider I have ever had, its flavor being lemongrass pear. After that we went to the first place I had previously found after Googling "best views of Denver skyline," where we had a shared dinner of five spectacular small plate dishes on the 20th-floor rooftop bar in the Le Méridian Denver Downtown Hotel called 54Thirty, named after its address. I took 14 photos there, including the one of the three of us at the top of this post. The view was very cool, if slightly sullied by a construction crane building a new tower that will clearly soon be blocking the otherwise great view of the Denver skyline from there.

We did a little bit more walking after that, including to the Blue Bear sculpture that stands 40 feet peeking into the windows of the Colorado Convention Center, and after that Sara drove us to her home in Thornton, me taking several shots of the Denver skyline at dusk along the way. It was about a quarter after 8pm Mountain Time when we reached there and met Sara's son Daniel's dog Jelly (Daniel was apparently staying with his aunt for the weekend, which Sara insisted was already planned and it just worked out, as he is currently living with Sara but Shobhit and I were still able to use the spare bedroom). Shobhit had talked about maybe busing back into town to go dancing or something, but he was too tired and so was I. Our plane had landed at about 3:00 in the afternoon; we were downtown shortly around 4:30; we spent the next six hours or so with Sara; I was in bed shortly after 10:30 pm.

With Sara gone much of the day on Sunday at work, it wound up being the least eventful of all three days, but still perfectly pleasant, with Shobhit and me basically just going with the flow all day. The 44-shot photo album for that day (from which the above shot of the Denver skyline is taken; it was the view as we took a pretty long walk down Colfax) can be found here, and it covers Shobhit and me taking a bus into town midmorning, with the initial intend of finding a lake to sunbathe at and maybe even swim in -- we were literally headed to a place I found online called "Swim Beach." It was very hot on Sunday, forecast high of 98° although that later changed in my app to 95° (pretty much when it reached that temperature) -- at least it was not humid, which makes that kind of heat easier to deal with.

Transit in Denver takes some getting used to though, and when we realized the bus was taking us quite a bit further south of the center of town than we realized, we randomly decided to get off the bus and roam around, as it was passing a little to the east of downtown. Apparently there was some bike race going on that day that had the bus on a detour, so it wasn't even going on the scheduled route when we got off. We found ourselves getting off right on the eastern edge of City Park, which just happened to come up in several of my searches for city views. We walked the length of the park, passed a beautiful building with a tall clock tower that we were surprised to find was a high school (the oldest one in Denver, apparently), and searched on Yelp for a nearby place to get brunch. That was how we wound up at a place called The Goods about a block from there, where we had a very tasty brunch that included bottomless drinks for only $14 -- Shobhit had three bloody marys and a mimosa; I had four "Morning Mules," which is basically a Moscow Mule mixed with orange juice. That drink really worked for me.

Shobhit got pretty buzzed but I didn't. And it was from there that we walked much of Colfax toward downtown -- stopping at both a Voodoo Doughnuts and an adult store along the way -- although we did wind up getting on a bus at one point, to get the rest of the way back to Union Station, where we caught an A train for just one stop to transfer back onto the #12 around 3:00 to head back to Sara's house (she had given me a spare key). We had thought we were going to have to wait something like forty minutes for the next bus, but the aforementioned bike race (which we never did actually see happening anywhere) had the buses' schedules so fucked up that the previous bus was super late and functionally came and picked us up early.

Sara was actually home when we got back, and we hung out with her for the rest of the evening. Shobhit really wanted to find a salad place for dinner after the heavy brunch we'd had, and when searching for salad bars, we found an Italian place called Cinzzetti's that sounded interesting. We had no idea until we got there that it's an all-you-can-eat buffet place that felt a lot like a cross between The Old Spaghetti Factory and The Cheesecake Factory. Sunday dinner prices per person were $16.99. But, we were so tapped out trying to figure out where else to eat instead, we decided to eat there anyway -- even though Sara didn't think she'd be able to eat much, and in the end the place literally had not one green salad without meat in it! They had several other types of vegetarian salads like pasta salad, but it seemed a little backward that anything that actually had lettuce was not vegetarian.

That did not stop all three of us from stuffing ourselves silly. Shobhit insisted he'd get the value out of it, and he very much did. I probably did too. Sara, maybe barely. She ate more than she thought she would, I think. Anyway, after that she drove us around to places with nice, panoramic views of the city. After that I was once again in bed pretty early -- this time at 10:11. Saturday and Sunday nights both, I managed more than eight hours of sleep -- even though the inflatable bed slowly deflated overnight both nights. When Shobhit got out of bed yesterday morning, I sank so low I could feel the floor. Oh, well! Sara was very apologetic and I joked, "You get what you pay for!" (She laughed.)

As for yesterday -- the photo album for which is here -- I got up early enough to see Sara for maybe half an hour before she had to leave for work. She thanked us too many times to count for coming to visit, and refused to let us pay for anything when we went out except for those first drinks at Wynkoop Brewing Company on Saturday, no matter how hard Shobhit in particular would try. We thanked her many times as well for having us, and she really did seem genuinely appreciative of our coming. I did ask her if anyone else from Washington had come to visit since she moved about a year ago, and she said no -- we were the first. She hopes to come visit Seattle sometime next year, after her new job is settled, and of course I told her she could stay in our guest room (if it's available, of course; God knows when Ivan will come back).

And we had a specific game plan for Monday, because you can only tour the Colorado State Capitol on weekdays, and only the guided tours get you up into the dome and out to see the views (you know why I was interested!). We kind of took our time getting going yesterday morning, but still left by about 9:40 to catch a #12 southbound at 9:54. We had all our bags with us, too, and although I looked up places to leave bags for storage -- which, annoyingly, Union Station has no service for -- Shobhit insisted we would be okay just taking it all around with us. And, indeed, we wound up pulling our small suitcase on its roller wheels all through the capitol when we toured it.

But, first we did yesterday's brunch, at the vegetarian place Sara had recommended, called City O'City -- and it was spectacular. Our waiter being a young Latin hunk was just icing on the cake -- or maybe I should say gravy; I ordered the biscuits and gravy. And they were delicious. And so was the "Sardou" egg dish Shobhit ordered. I could see the Capitol Building just a few blocks away out the window from there, and we walked straight there afterward, hoping to make it in time for the noon tour.

The Capitol building's website tour page says guided tours are on the hour between 10 a.m. and 3 pm on weekdays, and we were there a little after 11:30. We happened to see a tour in progress, and when we went to the counter and asked how long that one had been going on, he said only about eight minutes. There were two spots left and so he gave us badges and said we could join them.

And as it happened, this was easily the best views we got all weekend, and it was free. The dome is just part of the tour, though, and I found the entirety of the tour very fascinating. It occurred to me that I always tend to enjoy state capitol tours, be they in Washington, or Hawaii (that one was particularly interesting), and now Colorado. It occurred to me for the first time that ever state capitol I visit, I should make an effort to get a tour of the building. I should have done that when we were in Phoenix in 2014! Oh, well -- next time.

After that, we walked from there, through Civic Center and past the Denver City and County Building to the Unite States Mint, famous in Denver because it's the largest producer of coins in the world. Only problem? They're temporarily closed for tours! Damn it. That's why the only photos I got were of the building and of the gift shop, which itself was still kind of interesting.

It was after that when we were pretty much done with things to do, so although we did walk a bit more, down the 16th Street Mall after getting an iced chai at Starbucks, we then just made our way back to the A train and back to the airport.

My overall impression of Denver, in conclusion, is this: it's fine.

The city proper has a population nearly identical to that of Seattle, albeit very slightly smaller -- 2018 estimates being 716,492 vs 744,955 -- but Denver proper, a consolidated city-county that even includes its airport, has a land area (153 square miles) nearly twice that of Seattle (84 square miles), giving it half the density. And more importantly, the metropolitan population of Seattle -- a metric I am increasingly finding to be by far the most relevant for purposes of comparison -- actually has a million more people than that of Denver (3.9 million versus 2.9 million). I was telling Shobhit that this made me realize something I never thought of before: suburbs are giant feeders of workers with jobs in the core city, and that means that, even with city-proper populations so close to being the same, at any given time, particularly on a weekday, Seattle is actually going to have notably more people just in the city than Denver.

So, I have all manner of reasons for preferring Seattle to a city like Denver, and that's not even to mention how far Denver is from any large body of water, which I could really never live with. The thing is, a lot of the reasons I have to kind of dismiss Denver are reasons Sara loves it: it has far more wide open spaces, the buildings are more spread out, it's not really crowded anywhere at all. (I will admit downtown Seattle can get crazymaking with its crowds at times, but I'm willing to live with it.) Also, she grew up in nearby Boulder, which is a satellite city about 25 miles northwest, making it kind of like Denver's Tacoma. She said Boulder is just too rich and expensive anymore, but her family still lives in the area, so even though she wanted to be closer to the city of Denver, she basically split the difference and moved to a suburb in between them. And anyway, when it comes to wanting to be near family and the place she considers home, I totally get that -- it's one of many reasons I want to stay in Seattle.

All that said, without Sara living there, a revisit to Denver would not be anywhere at all on my priority list. I can check a new state off my list; done. On the other hand, I am especially fond of Sara and can see myself visiting her again. Also, on Facebook my cousin Heather was surprised to learn I was "so close" -- and I looked it up and discovered Cheyenne is a mere 100 miles to the north. So in a couple of years maybe, I'm thinking I may visit again, and rent a car, stay a day or two longer, and take a day trip up to meet Heather (who I have never met in person before) and also perhaps see Shane and maybe Uncle Garth and Gloria as well. I would never go out of my way to visit Cheyenne otherwise, honestly, but Denver is so close, why not? I'm also Facebook friends with a woman I used to go to high school with and I completely forgot she also lives in Denver, so I would probably get together with her as well. I really did not realize until yesterday how many connections I have in Denver, or at least within a 100 miles of it, however tenuous those connections may be.

In any case, it was a fun weekend, two nights was plenty for this time around, and I'm certainly glad I did it. I still haven't managed to caption any of the photos, but I hope to get that done over the next several days; I have also not yet had time to write up the requisite email photo digest but I do have its 18 shots selected and will get that done this evening. Whatever I write in there will at least get copied and pasted as captions for those photos on Facebook.

[posted 12:19 pm]