Welcome to Colorful Colorado: Denver!
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After two and a half long days of travel, @mrsbozz and I had finally arrived in Colorado. With my sister in law and nieces in tow, we simply had to wait until our AirBNB was available. If you are interested in the days leading up to our arrival, you can check them out in this post, or this post plus a couple more other ones. Just look back in my profile.
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I had mentioned before that we still needed to wait for my brother in law to show up. Instead of taking three days to get to Colorado, he decided to make the drive from Columbus, OH in just two. He drove about ten hours the first day before stopping in Kansas City to catch a baseball game that night. Then he drove the rest of the way on Saturday morning, finally arriving and meeting up with us around 1 or 2 in the afternoon.
We had just finished up getting groceries when he arrived. As much as we wanted to enjoy the local food in Denver, we also didn't like the idea of eating out every single meal. It's not great for your waistline or your pocket book. Since we were going to have a nice house with a nice kitchen area, it just felt right to cook some of our own meals.
We still had a bit of time before the house was ready, so we hung out in the parking lot you see above until it was time to check in.
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One thing that @mrsbozz and I really noticed is that time seems to kind of stand still the further west you go. At least up to a point. I'm sure people in Southern California don't feel that way. Perhaps it had something to do with driving out there instead of flying and slowing gaining those two hours from Eastern Time to Mountain Time. I honestly don't know, but we often found ourselves saying "it's only two o'clock, or it's only 7 o'clock. Even the days seemed to drag a bit while we were there, which honestly isn't a bad thing.
It wasn't until it was time to come home that we really felt like the week had flown by.
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As I mentioned before, the main reason we were in Denver was to watch my niece play softball. There is a huge softball tournament out there each year that has close to 1000 teams spread across the Denver metro area. At the time, we didn't realize most of our games were going to be in the Arvada area of Denver. Also, according to my brother in law, even though he tried to book our house a good six plus months before our arrival, the pickings were pretty slim.
We ended up at this nice house in the Thornton area, but looking back I think we would have prefered to be in Arvada. Thornton was nice, but it was more of an industrial area. I feel like there may have been more to do within walking distance in Arvada, plus we would have been closer to the softball fields.
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As I said, the house was nice, and the immediate neighborhood was walkable, but if you drifted a little too far, you soon found yourself in the vicinity of several liquor stores, a gentleman's club, and a number of other unsavory seeming places.
I will say that our house gave us relatively easy access to Interstates 25 and 270, so getting to places wasn't that difficult. Plus just a couple minutes north on 25 were some really nice shopping areas with lots of restaurants.
Traffic in Denver was interesting to me, it felt like there was never a time that there wasn't traffic, but the traffic always seemed to move at a decent pace. Sure the roads felt congested, but you never felt like you were "stuck in traffic" like you get here in Michigan during construction season. Perhaps @davedickeyyall has some insight on that since he lives in the Denver area.
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I also didn't realize Denver had such a huge Hispanic population. It seems like everywhere you went there was some form of Mexican restaurant right around the corner. Which is fine by me since that is one of my favorite cuisines. I think there had to be at least ten restaurants or taco/burrito joints within a 1/4 mile of the house we stayed at.
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As I said though, we didn't eat out every meal. I think we actually only had Mexican food once or twice while we were in Denver. The first night we grilled chicken for @mrsbozz and bratwurst for the rest of us. It was a gas grill versus a charcoal grill (which I am used to), but I managed to not burn anything or give everyone food poisoning!
That being said, I still can't stand gas grills...
After dinner and a bit of winding down from a long day of travel, we decided to find a local place to get some ice cream.
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We settled on a place called Little Man Ice Cream which has several locations in Colorado. We pulled up to the first one and found ourselves looking at a line of people wrapped around the block waiting to place their order.
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We decided to find a different location, so I navigated my brother in law to this small Little Man Stand somewhere in the city. I honestly can't tell you where it was, it was on the corner of a shopping plaza and it wasn't super busy, so we hopped out and placed our order.
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If you have ever heard of Jenni's Ice Cream, Little Man seemed to be a bit of a gourmet place like that. They didn't have your traditional flavors, they were all kind of fancy with weird or exotic twists to them.
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With our bellies full and our long days of travel behind us (at least for a little bit), we settled into the house and got ready for the adventures to come.
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We even found a puzzle in the house to work on, it took the six of us pretty much the whole week, but before our time was finished in Colorado, we finally completed the puzzle. It was much harder than it looks!
Tomorrow is #threetunetuesday so I will be taking a detour for that, but Wednesday I will be covering more of our first full day in Colorado.
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
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Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs definitely worth a visit if you haven't been. Our other favorite is Estes Park. It's too early for the big Elk herds, but in the fall there are dozens of them roaming all over town and congregating in the main town square park. It's very cool to see them and be that close (just not idiot close, lol).
It's coming up in a future post, but we did make it to Estes Park. We didn't spend a lot of time in the town (it was lousy with construction anyway), but we drove up Trail Ridge Road a bit. We did see one Moose/Elk up there. My inlaws stayed a couple days longer than we did and they made it down to Garden of the Gods. The photos looked amazing. I have a feeling this won't be the last time we visit Colorado!
Great job with the Bratwursts on the grill Bozz. I am getting tempted to get a gas grill, but stick with my coals one so far. In Germany we like the Nurembergers..
Those look pretty delicious! Are they like small breakfast links? I'd never give up my charcoal grill. In fact, I kind of want to get a second one so I can do even bigger cooks!
They are like the smaller ones yes, the kids love them.
Good to see you busting more moves on the grill.
Heavy on the sage flavor? They definitely sound similar to what we call breakfast links over here.
They can have a bit of flavour to them not sure sage. But when you buy Nurembergers, you know you get the real deal made in Nuremberg.
Wiki:
Nürnberger Rostbratwurst, literally "Nuremberg grilled sausage", is a partially boiled German sausage, typical of the city of Nuremberg
Ah, good to know!
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Amazing view in the first photo, it is a beautiful place. The house has a very nice design and definitely looks cozy to cook your own food, which also looks delicious :)
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Thank you! It was a really amazing place!
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It is a very beautiful place as the pictures portray
Thank you! This is only the beginning!
Looks like it was a nice place. That ice cream looks good. But... ice cream always looks good.
It's probably mostly that everything is new, that's why time seemed to go slower. Your brain has to work a little differently when things are new, unlike when things are the same in everyday life so your brain doesn't really need to make any new memories and time seems to fly as a result.
Yeah, that could be part of it I guess. I think part of it too was the fact that it stayed light so much later. That kind of threw us as well. The ice cream was delicious!
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That first photo makes it look all worth your travels. Oh I need to fire up the grill, of course I see this right at lunch time, hehe. Oh the ice cream, the best frozen dessert in my books looks so good to take in for some relaxation time. Take care and look forward to more of your trip stories!
That first photo is just a small drop of the shots we took. It's hard to take a bad photo in this area of the country though. There's beauty pretty much everywhere!
If there's more than 2 people, I think it's much better to get an AirBnb instead of multiple hotels rooms. It's much nicer to have communal space which isn't the hotel bar, and having the option to cook yourself or order Uber saves a lot of money compared to eating out all the time.
Yeah, in this case it made a lot of sense. Many times when I am looking for a place to stay for just my wife and I, the VRBO's and AirBNB's aren't really that much cheaper and you never quite know what you are going to get. I have found myself getting frustrated and just booking us in a hotel. This worked perfectly for the six of us though.
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What nice pictures you managed to take! It was a nice place you rented, looked comfortable. And you found some good ice cream to top it all off.
I do understand the time lag during those long drives, I think I've done so many over the years that I avoid them at all costs now. Flying is just so much faster...
I'm glad you two had a great trip!
Flying is definitely faster, but the huge gap you have to make up at the end sucks. At least when you fly my way!
The brats and chicken just jump out of the picture and beg me to eat them. You guys really enjoyed yourselves and I love following along. Not sure I would care for Denver the city, but could enjoy Colorado.
Denver wasn't too bad honestly. I'd never want to live in the big city either, but I don't mind visiting it from time to time.
Colorado is beautiful and where Mrs T is from. I loved the hot summer days, and got a heck of a shock how cold it got when the sun went down, reminded me of working in the Sahara!
Alot of Spanish actually settled in Colorado (where Mrs T's grandmother came from) too so not just Hispanics,
Glad you had fun, long drive though...
Good to know about the influences there! It's definitely an interesting dynamic, but it seems like a really awesome place. We enjoyed our time there even though the days were a bit hotter than we expected. The lack of humidity made it manageable.