9 Getting to Colorado
I don’t think that I can put into words the feeling of getting to Colorado. I had a great time driving around the Continent but seeing the Colorado border, well….
I had to stop and celebrate.
At that point I had driven 4743 miles in 12 days, including staying 3 days in Las Vegas and 5 in Canada. I have been to some great places along the way but Colorado is my favorite place to be to date. Even when you drive in areas that doesn’t have anything around, there is always the Rocky Mountains to look towards.
I feel different when I’m in Colorado. I don’t know if it’s the clean air or the altitude, but I love being there. I drove straight to Lakewood, which is a suburb of Denver. It’s where my friend Brad lives, and it’s the original reason for the Vacation. He’s getting married in a couple of days.
When I got to the apartment Brad’s brother Joe was there watching Presley. She’s Brad’s (soon to be, 4 year old stepdaughter (ADORABLE!)).
Everyone else was either at work, school or running around with wedding preparations, so it was nice to be able to relax a little and decompress.
The apartment of course has an amazing view, everything in Colorado apparently comes with a view. Even from the parking lot you can look off to the Rockies.
And there are Rabbits everywhere.
Literally all over the place. They must multiply like, well uhmm…. Rabbits!
When Brad got home Joe and I went with him to run some errands for the wedding. It was in the 80′s but there was no humidity what-so-ever. Brad drove a Pick-up and at one point I just sat in the bed of the truck and enjoyed the weather and the scenery.
Brad and Eva (the future Mrs. Brad) were very gracious and allowed me to stay at their house and that saved me from having to spend a ton of money on hotels. After running errands we got back to the apartment and everyone else was home. They offered me my own room, but there was just way too many people there and that would have been wrong, so I just set up an air mattress it the girls room. The little ones were usually asleep before I even thought about going to bed, and they were up and heading to school in the morning so it wasn’t a problem.
Wednesday Joe, Presley and I headed over to Boulder. I just love Boulder, it’s my favorite city in Colorado. We drove around a bit and them met Brad for lunch. He works in Boulder, and we went to one of many, many Microbrewery restaurants, Boulder Beers.
Microbreweries are very popular in Colorado and there are hundreds of them. In fact they hold the “Great American Beer Festival” in Denver every year, and there are like 400 breweries entered ( http://www.beertown.org/events/gabf/ ) Anyway, the food was pretty good.
After we left Brad we drove around some more and finally got to Pearl Street Mall. It’s one of those malls that are several blocks of outdoor walking area between streets in a park like setting.
It’s very nice and last time I came there was a lot of people performing for change. This time wasn’t much of a difference. There are also numerous art galleries
and specialty shops that are fun just to browse around. There are also many great restaurants and little ice cream parlors. We of course had to hit the Ben & Jerry’s Store. It was for Presley, I swear!!! We continued to walk around and sprinkled throughout the mall are little areas for the kids to stop and play. Presley of course asked to play in all of them, which was fine. But there was one that had sculptures of all kinds of animals for the kids to play on. There is a frog, a rabbit, a beaver and a snail. This was apparently commissioned in 1976. Well things happen over the course of many years of children roughhousing. Apparently at some point in the life of the snail, someone broke off an antenna. Children are innocent, so of course they see nothing really wrong with this display. Me, I’m standing there trying not to be childish and laugh (picture Beevis & Butthead). As another child prepares to jump up on the snail her mother yells out, “OH G-d! Not that one, NOT THAT ONE!” OK, I’m not the only one that sees it. You be the judge
See what I’m saying?!? Well right about this point my dumb ass realizes that I didn’t charge the camera when I got to Brads yesterday. I realized this because it died. We spent some more time walking around Boulder and then we drove back to Lakewood.
Thursday we drove back to Boulder again. I can’t get enough of being there and this time I wanted to check out the campus of the University of Colorado -Boulder. It was a beautiful (and HUGE) campus and we spent several hours walking around
One of the neat things about the campus; which is also synonymous with Colorado in general; is that in many of the places where they have walkways they also have bike lanes.
This way the people who are walking aren’t getting run down by the bikes, and the bikes have their own lane in each direction. Very cool. Many people ride their bikes in Colorado when the weather permits. After several hours walking around and talking to the admissions personnel Presley had enough. She hadn’t gotten a nap yesterday or today and so we headed back.
Friday was about running around and getting wedding things done and getting hotels for some of the people coming into town. Brads mom was already there, and had been for a week. Brads dad and grandfather, sister and her 2 kids and Joe’s wife and 2 boys were coming in. That was a lot of bodies in a 3 bedroom apartment. After picking up the tables and chairs from the rental place we went and got 2 hotel rooms. 1 for Dad and grandpa George. 1 was for Joe and Debbie. He hadn’t seen his wife in 2 weeks and he wanted some alone time. Brad kept telling the guy behind the counter, “Put the 2 rooms next to each other.” I finally told Brad, “Do you really think it would be a good idea to have Dad & Grandpa NEXT DOOR to Joe and Debbie, considering they hadn’t seen each other for 2 weeks?!?” They finally got the message. We then had to drop off all the rented supplies and furniture in the hotel rooms cause there was no place to store them in the apartment. Then it was run to the airport to get everyone coming in. It took 3 vehicles to get everyone and their stuff.
Without dropping anyone or anything off, it was off to the restaurant to have dinner with the 2 families. There was a lot of us. We went to a restaurant called White Fence Farm
http://www.whitefencefarm.com/Template.php?-p=Home
The food was great. They bring out these things called corn fritters. You can see the bowl of them on the kids table. It’s instead of rolls and all I can describe them as are little globes of heaven. They’re like corn meal donut holes, served warm. If I had known about them prior to ordering my fish, I would have just ordered corn fritters. They were fabulous. A funny little side note was that as I was leaving Colorado to head home, I actually contemplated stopping there to get an order of corn fritters for the road, that’s how good they were. For desert Brad recommended the Brandy Parfait. Turns out it was made with REAL brandy. It was awesome!!!
After dinner we went out side to let the kids burn off some energy on the huge play area they have.
Then it was a game of musical cars, drop back to the apartment for last minute decorating and details and much needed sleep. Tomorrow was the big day.
CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT THE WEDDING
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