Denver journey

This past week I spent a lovely couple days in Denver. It is the type of city that I think grows on you with time. It doesn't hit you with its bueaty they way some cities do (e.g., Sydney, Boston, etc.), but when you dive into the experience treasures abound. I went from thinking, what a lovely place to visit but not for me to live to "hmmm if life brought me here, this could be pretty cool." More importantly I completely see how great our dear friends are doing here in their readopted city! For those who know these amazing people, I can report that they are living it up in a wonderful place. Their cat's personality continues to age very well, and I even got to see the home they are purchasing! It is in a sweet location. It was so wonderful to share a slice of the life they are building together this week and see it first hand.

They are still walkers... something that you don't always find out west, which seems to breed huge cars and trucks like locusts. This is a bad picture of a lovely walk that connected their neighborhood to the downtown via a set of really cool stairs and bridges over the railroad and Platte River. Both very historic and famous in the history of the American West.

As lovely as the scenery was, the cold made bundling up a very idea. I am glad to say that my knowledge of how to dress warmly developed when I lived in Chicago and Boston hasn't completely left me, even if I haven't seen a frigid winter in over 2 years, and managed to skip winter all together when I first moved to New Zealand.


Denver has some really cool new infrastructure, such as this skate park!

I also got a snow day!!!! I was really hoping for one while I'm here in the Northern Hemisphere. Oregon was an unlikely candidate, so I was thrilled when Colorado came through for me on the last day.




I swung by a local Safeway grocery store...not only was there heaps of cheap Thanksgiving wares, but also a Tower of Tortillas!!!


I think its funny that the tortillas are stored next to the ice scrappers for you car.

Then it was off to the airport. In the past, I've been in 2-3 hours lines in the space photographed below. This trip I only waited for 2 minutes at the counters and at security. And this is supposedly the busiest part of the traveling year, and yet I got on a somewhat empty flight on standby with no problem.



well there was one problem... only one of my suitcases made it on the standby flight, which is fine given than I checked in only 20 minutes before boarding started at a very large airport. But the wierd thing was that the airlines delivered my suitcase that night, at my parent's house that is in the middle of nowhere, at 3 am! strange.