Day 12: Denver

Coors Field, our third baseball stadium of the trip

Saturday, August 14

Downtown Denver

Didn't sleep too well b/c the people above us in the Residence Inn were throwing some sort of rager until 4 am.  Still, we got up around 8 so we could make the hotel breakfast.  After getting some grub, we ran some errands downtown.  Somehow my cell phone charger had been cut in half in my bag in the past day or two.  Even though I'll be switching phones after the trip, I didn't want to be without a cell for the next 9 days, so I ended up buying a charger at RadioShack.  I also had to call up ING b/c my atm card wasn't working and I was completely out of cash, but got that sorted out too.

We had been planning on participating in Denver's Microbrew Bar Tour (the highest rated activity in Denver on tripadvisor.com), but they were sold out, so we decided to create our own afternoon Denver brewpub tour.  We took the complimentary hotel shuttle into downtown and the driver suggested that we go to Falling Rock, which he said was considered the best beer bar in the city.  We went there first, and it had a very impressive beer list.  We got lunch and a couple drinks there and then moved on to Wynkoop Brewing Company, where I sampled a Chili flavored beer.  It tasted pretty good, but I wasn't ready for an entire pint so I ordered Tut's Royal Gold, an "Imperial Egyptian Ale" instead.  The next stop was Denver's Chophouse and Brewery, where I had a bourbon flavored stout.  We were right next to Coors Field at the time so we bought tickets for the evenings game (only $12 and $50 tickets were available, so we decided we'd take the cheap seats).  The final stop of our makeshift bar crawl was Great Divide Brewing Company, which featured a few more yummy beers.

Large draft beer selection at Falling Rock Brewery

When we were done with our beverage samplings we hopped over to the Rockies' game.  We ended up sitting in the outfield upper deck on the 3rd base line, fairly low down.  The game was close and went into extra innings before the Brewers eventually won 5-4 in the 10th inning.  That made home teams 0-3 in games that we attended on the road trip.  After the game we were able to call up the Marriott shuttle, and they picked us up and brought us back to the hotel.

From my short time in Denver, I have to say I'm a pretty big fan.  We walked around the neighborhood outside the sushi restaurant on Friday night and it reminded me a lot of some of the nicer suburban areas in DC.  When I ran my errands downtown this morning, some of the streets were closed off just for pedestrians and there were tons of people walking around.  It seemed like a real nice, clean, young, urban area with a decent amount of places to go to.  Our bar crawl consisted of 4 breweries/brewpubs which were all within walking distance to Coors Field, which was pretty impressive and reminded me of the areas outside of Wrigley earlier in the trip.  I have no intentions of ever living outside of the coasts, but I declared earlier in the day that if I had to pick a city inland to move, that based on my small sample of experiences, Denver might have moved itself to the top of the list.

My last photo with another human for the next week

Anyway, it was nice getting back into a legit city after spending so much time in the middle of nowhere, but that comes to an end tomorrow as I'll be spending the next 6 days camping and hiking in National Parks in Colorado, Utah, and Arizona before making it to Vegas next Friday.  Not sure how much internet I'll have as I travel through the desert, but I'll try to keep the updates going when I can.

Miles traveled today: 4
Miles traveled total: 2,951
States traveled through: 11