[Adapted from email sent 5:29 pm]

Saturday, July 16: Blast From the Past in Westminster, Colorado

None of you know this woman, but I'm sharing her picture anyway. It's my travelogue and I can do what I want with it! Her name is Alice. It used to be Jill. We used to go to high school together, and I'm sure she was much relieved to hear that, in our 1994 high school graduation yearbook, I declared her "nice." (Other schoolmates did not fare as well in my estimation.) She has lived in Denver for over twenty years now, is married to a man from the area with whom they are raising now-16-year-old fraternal twins—who, incidentally, both have very long hair and grow their fingernails long. Kindred spirits, apparently. I didn't get to meet them; Alice merely showed me their photos from her phone—they ask that she not post their photos online and she respects that. She said one of them is 5'11" and 116 lbs ("I created a supermodel!") but I digress.

When Shobhit and I traveled to Denver in 2019 to stay with and visit Sara, it was after I posted about being there that Alice, with whom I had been Facebook friends for a while, that she noted she lived there. So, when I returned, I contacted her to schedule getting together for lunch right after I landed in Denver and picked up my rental car. We talked and reminisced and caught up for a few hours and it was very nice.

I really loved this photo until I realized I have food stuck in my teeth. Goddammit! I need to find someone to photoshop that out of my mouth.

Return to Westminster Castle

In 2019, Sara took us to Westminster Castle, which is situated in a spot in the Denver suburb of Westminster with a panoramic view of the Denver skyline. (It's also now called "Belleview Christian School".) That first visit was at nighttime, though, and so between my late lunch with Alice and finally making it to Sara's house in the neighboring suburb of Thornton, I stopped for some daytime shots. This time I brought my binoculars, which was how I got this great shot of the Denver skyline from there.

Sunday, July 17: Boulder, Colorado

Boulder is more specifically where Sara is from, where she was born and raised; Thornton is situated a fair bit between there and downtown Denver—22 miles from Boulder and 9 miles from downtown Denver. Sara clearly liked the idea of showing me around her hometown, which there wasn't really time to do when we visited before; I happily took her up on her offer to drive me out there for a day visit on Sunday, leaving early in a bid to beat at least some of the oppressive heat the whole region had my entire visit (each day had a high between 96° and 100°).

We spent a fair amount of time in the morning walking Boulder's Pearl Street Mall, discovering that this particular weekend also happened to be the Pearl Street Arts Fest, so we got to see a lot of very cool art. This was a favorite, a Colorado landscape superimposed over a map of the region.

Also visible along the Pearl Street Mall is the Boulder County Courthouse, a beautiful, Art Deco building constructed in 1934. The coolest thing about it, though, was the historic plaque we found mounted just outside the front entrance, commemorating it as the place where Boulder County Clerk Clela Rorex issued the first same-sex marriage licenses in the United States—in 1975. That was forty years before the U.S. Supreme Court effectively legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015, which I found amazing.

When I visited Alice on Saturday, and I told her I was going to Boulder the next day, she brought up several of the same things Sara also told me about that city, including some "ghost tours" of the city that typically include this, the Arnett-Fullen House, built in 1877. Ghosts are plainly bullshit, but the history still fascinates me. And I do find this bit amusing: "There is also rumored to be a little girl in a white dress who enjoys hanging out on the spiral staircase. The owners are cool with the ghost stories about their home and even put a mannequin in the tower window to creep out passersby." I just love the idea of a single-family home with its own tower. If I ever have an actual house (which is unlikely), I want it to have a tower.

Here is Sara, standing in front of Boulder's Dushanbe Teahouse, which Alice had recommended as a Boulder point of interest and Sara was happy to choose as our lunch spot. The teahouse is a reflection of Boulder's sister city, Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, and its connection to local history dates back to 1987. It's a beautifully designed place, and their food and drinks all being delicious was an added bonus, most especially my "Lady London Fog," one of the best tea beverages I have ever had. Sara was similarly impressed with her lapsang souchong tea, although I wasn't; I actually like smoky flavor usually, but that shit tasted like straight up liquid smoke. That isn't right.

Sara and I spent a combined half an hour or so walking a footpath alongside Boulder Creek, which included the Boulder Public Library, which had a lovely design including two separate wings connected by a skybridge over the creek. The weather wasn't my favorite, as by this time it was well into the mid-nineties, but I did get some lovely pictures, of both Boulder Creek and the library, including some shots from inside.

From a quick drive along the northern border of Chautauqua Park, a view of Boulder's distinct sandstone formations, the Flatirons. These guys are almost 300 million years old. So I guess I should quit bitching about being 46.

Sara also took me up to nearby Flagstaff Mountain, which has its own panoramic views of the City of Boulder. We had to improvise with this lower lookout than the ideal one at Sunrise Amphitheater, though, because a couple of assholes had the nerve to have a wedding there that day. I'm pretty sure this spot afforded a better view of the city anyway, and made for a perfect backdrop for a selfie with Sara at her hometown.

Our last stop in Boulder: NCAR, or the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Sara says that in the past they have very interesting tours, which due to the pandemic remain closed until further notice. The very cool Mesa Laboratory building was worth driving up the hill to take a look at on its own, though, and Sara and I agreed that once it opens for tours again, it will be a perfect agenda item for my next visit, probably in another two or three years.

After returning to Sara's place, she'd had a full enough day but I had a couple of hours to kill, and decided to take my rental car and go down to City Park and get a few photos of downtown Denver from the far side of Ferril Lake. It took me a while to find parking, which I discovered to be largely because of the Third Annual Brass Band Extravaganza, which happened to be going on that evening. It provided a nice soundtrack to my walk around the lake. Then I got myself an order of $6 nachos for a light dinner at one of the many food trucks before heading back out.

Monday, July 18: High Point, Nebraska

Here was something I hadn't known to expect: when my GPS said to "veer left" to stay onto Weld County Rd 136—as opposed to following the curve of the arterial I was on to turn right onto County Rd 89—I did not know I would be driving onto a road that was unpaved. The paved road turns, and going this direction meant actually going straight; I think Siri says to "veer left" in an attempt to make it clear I was indeed meant to drive off the paved road—although I had to look several times at the moving map on my phone just to make sure I was indeed going where I was supposed to.

Never in my life have I deliberately driven so far into the middle of nowhere, all by myself. But, I was on a mission! I was driving ninety minutes out of my way—literally doubling the drive time I would otherwise have—to Cheyenne, Wyoming, just so I could get all of two miles into Nebraska, and then, well, I could say I've been to Nebraska.

It was a good 15 miles of these packed gravel roads before reaching Panorama Point, my specific Nebraska destination barely across the state line in the southwest corner of the state's fat eastern panhandle, the last road of which was more of a straight-up dirt road, which, although it also had small rocks, was a more comfortable drive for me. The first roads with more gravel on them freaked me out just slightly, as I was in a rather nice, white Kia rental car. I could hear lots of pebbles getting kicked up by my tires and hitting the bottom of the car. I have literally never owned a car of my own, and although I relatively frequently drive Shobhit's car, it's a now-ancient 2004 Nissan Sentra, so I have no real sense of how much of a concern this should be. Still, in the end I drove these last 15 miles at an average of around 40 mph. The noise from the gravel didn't sound any different at that speed than it did at 25 or 30 mph, so I figured, fuck it.

I had driven about twenty miles of these gravel roads before I finally hit another paved road, just over the state line in southeast Wyoming, which was a relief. Smooth sailing after that! I didn't even mind getting stuck behind a John Deere tractor for several minutes. At least the road was paved.

Anyway. There seems to be some inconsistency regarding what this point of interest in the southwest corner of the Nebraska panhandle is actually called: online maps identify it as "Panorama Point," but the local signage calls it "High Point"—as does the Facebook page for it that I didn't know existed until they liked my checkin-post, mere hours after I posted it.

In fact, I passed that entry sign without fully registering what it said, at first, because Siri's GPS took me to a secluded driveway to what looked very much like an abandoned house surrounded by decrepit cars, with its own NO TRESPASSING sign and an additional note, High Point 1/2 mile. I figured out a few minutes later that it meant half a mile in the direction from which I came, and at first I drove another full mile to a T in the aforementioned dirt road, until I had the wherewithal to stop relying on Siri and just look up the roads on Google Maps and navigate back to the earlier turn that turned out to be the actual entrance, itself less than 800 feet from the Coloado/Nebraska state line.

I was so preoccupied with just finding the High Point marker that I didn't even notice the sign asks for a $3 entry fee until I looked at the photo later on my computer. Oops! I totally viewed-and-dashed. I still don't even know where I was supposed to leave the three bucks, and I was the only person there when I visited, so as far as Nebraska knows I was never there anyway!

Side note: there are bison roaming around this area, and according to the Facebook page were right next to the High Point marker as recently as last Wednesday—five days before I was there—but there was no bison to be seen when I was there. I did have two sightings of pronghorn but they zipped by so quickly I had no time to get any photos. I was otherwise completely alone for the roughly half an hour I was there, unless you want to count the flies that were buzzing around the "Elevation 5,424" marker.

Cheyenne, Wyoming

My day trip to Cheyenne, Wyoming was the sole reason I rented a car for this visit to Colorado (and Nebraska, and Wyoming). Had I driven straight there from Denver, the drive would have been about 90 minutes, all of it on interstates. Detouring to High Point, Nebraska meant a two-hour drive first to High Point, that time largely because of how much more slowly I had to drive on those unpaved county roads. It was another hour from there to Cheyenne, which I reached at about noon on Monday, having left early enough to allow lots of time for all of the above.

Shobhit and I took an anniversary trip to Yellowstone National Park in 2018, so I had already been to Wyoming. This was my first time to Cheyenne as an adult, though (technically I had been there once before, when my parents drove us there to visit my Uncle Garth in 1978, but I was 2), and this was diagonally clear on the opposite end of the state.

I am always interested in touring state capitols when I have the opportunity though, so that was first on my agenda for this visit. I was meeting a cousin, but I got there about half an hour before she did, and got this great exterior shot of the Wyoming State Capitol while I waited. The flags were some early decorations for the city's biggest annual event, Frontier Days, for the duration of which, I was told, the city's population triples. So I guess for about a week Cheyenne's usual population of about 64,000—this is the largest city in Wyoming; the entire state has a smaller population than the City of Seattle—balloons to about 200,000.

Population 64,000 or not, you know I had to go and find the tallest building in Cheyenne! May I present, Wyoming Financial Center. It was 11 floors and was built in 1990. It's all of two feet taller than the Wyoming State Capitol, which stands at 146 ft and was built in 1890.

Okay so I fully admit this isn't the best photo with which to introduce you to my cousin, Heather. There will be better ones momentarily, I swear! The point of this shot, actually, is the gray-haired lady further to the right, in the black pants and the white shirt. She was the volunteer who greeted us, and all other visitors to the Wyoming State Capitol, when we arrived.

To my legitimate surprise, when she asked where I was from and I said Seattle, she said, "I'm from Seattle!" Granted, then she told me she was from Yakima. I kind of thought, Uhhh. (For those of you not from here, Yakima is a city of about 94,000 people in Central Washington, a good 110 miles as the crow flies—142 miles if you're driving—southeast of Seattle, on the other side of the Cascade Mountains. No one would think of it as part of Seattle.) I decided to let it go, though, when she told me she has family in Tacoma and in Edmonds and has been in and lived in the Seattle area, so, close enough, I guess. I asked what brought her all the way out here and she said it was her husband, who worked with Wyoming state government. She moved out here forty years ago—nearly as long ago as my paternal Uncle Garth did, himself for military reasons. He's the only one of my dad's siblings who moved out of Washington State and never moved back.

The little girl to the right is Isabella, one of Heather's two children she brought with her. That would make Isabella my first cousin once removed. Not that anyone feels these distinctions are that important.

Clearly a holdover from pandemic restrictions, the Wyoming State Capitol is still not doing guided tours, but they do have a video tour you can watch and walk around with, easily accessed via a posted QR code. We did not have enough combined attention spans for that while we were there, but the native-Washingtonian volunteer lady provided a good enough introduction and welcome to the capitol.

Although the Wyoming State Capitol was top of my agenda for visiting Cheyenne, the primary purpose of the visit was to meet my cousin Heather, who I did not even know existed until I was in my late teens, and knew no more than just that she existed until she friended me on Facebook five years ago. It's a convoluted story, but suffice it to say, her mother raised her without allowing my uncle into her life, and she didn't know about him (or the rest of our extended family) until discovering paperwork in a filing cabinet when she was well into adulthood. As a kid, I only knew of Uncle Garth, his wife Glorya, and my cousin Shane who I thought was, and was effectively raised as, an only child. Heather and I got to know each other a little bit over Facebook Messenger—as she reconnected with her biological father and brother for the first time since she was a very small child—and then, after I discovered during my last visit to Denver that Cheyenne is only a ninety-minute drive away, I stayed three nights instead of two this time, just so I could take one of the days to drive up and meet her.

We met on the steps of the Wyoming State Capitol. The above shot was taken after we finished touring, and I asked a local lady to take a picture of me with Heather and her two children, Michael (13) and Isabella (9). Over the past few years, Heather has met a few other relatives who happened to be visiting Uncle Garth in Cheyenne: Uncle Paul one time; my dad and stepmother another time. I'm the first of her biological cousins she has met, though. I think we connected fairly well online due to her being a very liberal person in a very red state.

Red state or not, I found it very interesting to tour the State Capitol, as I always do—this is now the fifth one I have toured, and the seventh that I have been to (I was unable to go inside the capitol buildings in Anchorage, Alaska and Salem, Oregon).

After the Wyoming State Capitol, Heather took me around to several other local points of interest, including the Laramie County Library, which, especially for a city this size, is indeed a very nice facility. Heather is self-employed and often utilizes their free meeting rooms to meet clients, and she told me she has spent a lot of time there with her kids. I do have a thing for public libraries, and after visiting the central libraries in both Boulder and Cheyenne on this trip, I am realizing public libraries are becoming just about as high on my to-do list as capitol buildings or skyscrapers are.

To clarify, though, the Laramie County Library is not seen in the above shot; rather, it's the view from the library—from its second-floor outdoor balcony, of the Cheyenne, uh, "skyline." That's the Wyoming Financial Center on the right!

Tuesday, July 19: killing time in Downtown Denver

Hey look, it's probably the least interesting photo to nearly everyone reading this entire email! So why do I care about it, do you ask? This is "Block 192," and it isn't even the tallest building in Denver by a longshot—it's the city's 11th-tallest, actually, at 460 ft and 30 floors. But! It's the only new skyscraper built since I last visited, in 2019; it topped off in 2020 and opened in 2021. You know me, I like to find out what's new since my last visit. As a matter of fact, in this group selfie taken with Shobhit and Sara from the 20th-floor 54thirty Rooftop Bar during our 2019 visit, you can see a construction crane that would have to have been this building under construction—it happens to be located diagonally right across the street.

I returned my rental car at the airport early on Tuesday, as it needed to be back by 12:30 but my flight home wasn't until 5:25. So I took the Budget Rent-a-Car shuttle to the airport, bought a Denver transit day pass, and rode the light rail back into downtown to hang out for a few hours. I walked 11 blocks (0.8 miles) with my suitcase just to get this shot. Now that's commitment, to something that really isn't all that important!

While I was still across the street from the Block 162 building, I Googled points of interest in downtown Denver; saw Civic Center Park on one of the lists; and discovered it was all of another five blocks from where I was standing. What the hell, why not! I went over there and took several photos, including this one of the Colorado State Capitol. (Side note: with Denver and Cheyenne being only about 100 miles apart, for a hot second I wondered if they were the closest two state capitals to each other. Hardly! I totally spaced the tiny states of New England. The closest two state capitals are Providence, Rhode Island and Boston, Massachusetts, which are only 41 miles apart.)

After a solo breakfast at City O'City, the vegetarian restaurant Sara had suggested to us in 2019, we were really impressed with, and Shobhit texted the suggestion I go to this time, I then killed time walking the 1.4 miles back to Union Station, rolling my suitcase all along the way. I then caught the light rail back to the airport again, having hung out downtown for about three hours.

This is a lovely outdoor lounge area situated above the airport light rail station, but below the airport's winglike Westin Hotel. As seemed to happen briefly most afternoons I was there in the region, clouds had gathered in the midafternoon and there was a couple of lightning strikes in the distance. There was even a minor delay of our plane pulling out of its gate due to a lightning strike somewhere on the airport grounds, after which apparently all outside crew has to go inside for a set amount of time. If you learn something new every day, I guess that was the thing I learned on Tuesday.