travel dates: September, 2024
Usually what happens when we take a short, non-summer, often non-RV trip, is that I figure I’ll blog about it when I’m caught up on summer trip posts and then, predictably, I’m never actually caught up on summer trip posts, so these shorter trips are lost to history.
No more! Or at least not this time. We just got back a couple of weeks ago from visiting Ari and his girlfriend Abby in Denver (where Ari just started grad school), and I’m going to post about it right now. A quick post for a quick trip. We were there for less then 48 hours, partly to take advantage of Southwest’s two free checked bags policy to bring Ari a bunch of his winter clothes and his French press, because these are the most important things to have when you live in Denver. We plan to spend a lot more time in Denver next summer, so this trip was a preview of that. Stay tuned for SO MUCH Denver/eastern Colorado content!
I didn’t bring my real camera along this time (because on the way back we went for a cheap, personal item only flight), so this will be an iPhone photo dump type of post.
We one full day and one half day in the Denver area, and we decided to spend the full day heading west to check out Red Rocks and Golden. At Red Rocks we started out peeking at the amphitheater:
Our plan was to do a hike and then come back and see the amphitheater from the top of those steps, too, only the hike ended up starting a lot further downhill than we thought it was going to, and we opted not to do quite so much up when we were finished. Also it was about to shut down to the non-paying public because of a concert by the time we finished.
So we walked from here down to the Trading Post to hike the mile and a half Trading Post Trail. But first we stopped in at the actual Trading Post.
Now I’ve been to a lot of overpriced gift shops in my day, but I think this one beat them all! For overpriced-ness that is. By the end we were all looking at price tags and literally giggling. $80 polo shirt with a Red Rocks logo anyone? No? How about a small bottle of water for $5.50? Perhaps I could interest you in a $45 acrylic beanie! We did not make any purchases.
But we did (of course) take a picture with the John Denver statue outside:
The Trading Post trail is a really lovely way to see a lot of the rock formations plus mountain views at Red Rocks.
We went counterclockwise from the Trading Post, which meant we had a lot of downhill for the first half of the hike and a lot of uphill towards the end. Ari and Abby did fine but it was a little challenging for us relative flatlanders (sure. We’ll blame it on the altitude!) All Trails tells me it’s 364 feet of elevation gain…so not a ton, but a fair amount to have concentrated in such a short hike.
After the hike we drove to Golden and grabbed dinner at Woody’s Pizza. We had been anxious to get here as soon as possible, because we were worried it would be crowded with a long wait. We were there by around 5 if I remember right, and it wasn’t crowded at all, but we did walk by later and note that the crowds had indeed arrived. This place was great for gluten free people like Abe, as they have GF chicken fingers (and pizza. But Abe went with chicken fingers). They also have an all you can eat buffet for around $17, and most of us got that. There’s also free popcorn! We had a table outside, which was great, because it was a nice day and because downtown Golden is adorable.
There’s a lot of stuff to do in Golden that we were interested in. Like you can tour the Coors brewery! But the tours were all full by the time we thought to look. Or you can ride a train at the Colorado Railroad Museum! But there are no train rides available in September. Oh well! Summer!
So! Our post-dinner objective was to just kind of wander and see the town and to walk along Clear Creek (which runs right through downtown) and make our way to the Clear Creek RV Park, where we’re hoping to stay for a few days next summer. Tubing is a really popular summer activity in the creek (and, in fact, there were a good many people tubing in late September as well).
The RV Park is in an amazing location, right on the creek and bike path that runs into town. It’s also tiny and books up fast, so I’m already nervous about scoring a site.
This had all been an awful lot of walking for Abe, so we stopped on the way back to the car for ice cream/coffee:
The next day we needed to leave for the airport around 3, so we had a good bit of the day available. But we had trouble settling on anything to do. After much consideration, we decided on wandering around Cheesman Park, which is right by Ari’s apartment, and doing some geocaching. It’s a very nice park!
Look! Mountains!
Geocache found!
Then we got some lunch and headed off to the airport, where a very bumpy flight home awaited us. But we survived!
You really can’t do grad school without good coffee.
We stayed at his apartment and realized he owns one dishtowel and three different devices for making coffee. Priorities!
Priorities, indeed!