Denver

For those of you following along, last Saturday we checked out Denver for the first time. This started with a trip to the upscale Cherry Creek Shopping Center where the anchors are Macy's, Neiman Marcus, Saks, and Nordstrom. Yes!!

Driving around downtown, we passed the capitol building. It has a distinctive shiny gold dome, and a marker on the steps denotes the exact height of 5,280 ft. above sea level for the Mile High City. (Also, a purple row of seats in the baseball stadium marks the same thing.)

The dome, shown below (pic from Wikipedia), was originally copper but since that oxidizes to a green patina I guess Coloradoans wanted something that would stay shiny! It's quite pretty in person. I'm sure we will go back another time to do a tour of the Capitol and the nearby Denver U.S. Mint.

We drove by City Park and the Denver Zoo, other popular attractions, before ending up at the 16th Street Mall. This pedestrian mall stretches about a mile in the middle of Downtown Denver, filled with shops and restaurants. There is a free trolley that runs up and down it regularly too. It was really a nice area. We walked around for awhile looking for some dinner before settling on a small corner Italian restaurant.

At one point we ducked inside a shopping center and ended up passing the ESPN Zone restaurant. Outside, they have a tiled wall mural depicting players from each of Denver's four major sports teams. Here's Simon! (I tried to get him to pose like the basketball player, but he didn't want to :)

I'm looking forward to going back to Denver another weekend!

We rounded out the weekend by having a barbeque Monday night in honor of Memorial Day -- burgers, peaches, corn on the grill, and potato chips, with brownies for dessert! Also last weekend we acquired two bicycles at garage sales, so we went for a ride Monday. Fort Collins is great for biking, with many designated bike lanes and generally an impressive number of people using this form of transportation.

More soon on what we've been up to the past few days to finally get this blog current. We had a great time this weekend visiting with our friends and (respective) former roommates Andy and Karri!