Day 3 Recap

Day 3: We spent most of Friday in Denver and most of that time was just walking around the city. There were a ton of restaurants that looked good but not a whole lot of things to do, especially when none of the sports teams were playing and Six Flags was closed. It was a fairly interesting city though and was very walkable. If I lived in Denver, I doubt I would own a car because there are bike/walk lanes everywhere. In fact, the entire area is very biker-friendly. There were people on bikes on every road (besides the Interstates) everywhere between Denver and Estes Park, where we spent the night.

We took the light rail into downtown Denver. It was a couple bucks cheaper than parking and a whole lot easier than driving around downtown. The only thing we really did in Denver was go to the aquarium. It was ok, but the highlight was the restaurant inside the aquarium. It’s a relatively upscale restaurant surrounded by a fishtank. The food was easily the best we’ve had on the trip so far (which admittedly isn’t saying much when we’ve only paid for four meals so far). In fact, that may have been the highlight of Denver.

Other than that we just walked around, only stopping in a few places. We started on one end of downtown and saw the Colorado capitol building, with its dome coated in gold, and stood on the step that marked exactly 1 mile above sea level. From there we kind of wandered our way down to the Pepsi Center, where the Nuggets play, and then over to Invesco Field, where the Broncos play. There wasn’t a whole lot to do at either of those places besides look in the gift shops. From there we went to the aquarium and then back to our train stop down 16th Avenue, which is just a long strip mall. No cars drive on the road except free shuttle buses. We stopped to see what was in the ESPN Zone and stopped at Radio Shack to buy a new three-way plug for the car because the one we had broke.

I guess my summary is that if you want to live in Colorado, Denver would be a nice place, but if you’re visiting, there are much better places to go.

Such as Estes Park. I guess there isn’t a whole lot to do there either, but what do you expect from a town with 5400 people (less than Chillicothe for those of you keeping score at home). The location of the town was amazing though. It’s right on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park and completely surrounded by mountains. The town also more or less surrounds a lake. Like Denver, it was very biker/walker-friendly. There were paths around the lake and toward the mountains that you could get on from just about every part of the town. It’s clearly a big tourist town because downtown had a bunch of little novelty and souvenir shops. There were also a lot of hotels, which made it easy to find a fairly cheap one. We walked around town and along the edge of the lake before heading back to our room to watch the basketball game; I got some good pictures:

The mountains in the distance forshadowed where we’d head the next day.

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