A Friday Night in Denver

After a thankfully uneventful morning of travel, I got into the Denver airport at 3:30ish Mountain Time. But since they built the airport in the middle of nowhere, it does take a significant amount of time to get into the city, so I checked into my hotel around 4:45.

My lovely room at the Denver Grand Hyatt.

My view.

After settling in, I ventured out to walk the 16th Street Mall, a stretch of road lined with restaurants and shops and driven on only by the free mall shuttle that takes you from one end to the other if you find it a strain to walk a dozen blocks. I randomly ran into someone I knew from Bay City who was also in town for the wedding—she used to work with the youth group I went to with Tina—and a friend of hers, so we all had dinner together, which she bought for me! Too fun.

Then we walked around downtown together for a bit, after which we parted ways at their hotel and I kept on walking in the fading pink, purple, and orange light of the evening.

There's a lot of public art in downtown Denver, and even many of the sidewalks are works of at, with beautifully designed brick and tile patterns. This is the art museum, but many of the buildings are imaginatively designed to make an artistic impression.

Yes, that is a three-story dustpan.

There were several brightly painted upright pianos along the 16th Street Mall. Shoppers and diners stopped to play them and some were quite good.

There was a boy juggling to raise money for some Boy Scout thing, a panhandler playing an assortment of silverware with two screwdrivers, a concert, people handing out tracts, skateboarders, hoards of shoppers and diners, bicycle taxis, horse-drawn carriages, and a lone guy in an alley playing an electric guitar.

I loved the enormous planters full of annuals that featured interesting foliage rather than flowers.

As the sun disappeared behind the mountains, I grabbed a mango smoothie from Jamba Juice and headed back to the hotel.

It may have been just 8pm in Denver, but in my body it was 10pm and I was ready to settle down in bed . . . if I could find it under the seven pillows.

I started a new old book on the plane and I spent the next hour or so reading. It was the first time in a long time I've been able to start and finish a book in just a couple days. I'll be blogging about the book on my other blog, The Books I Should Have Read, some time in the very near future.

Then I turned off the light and said goodnight to Denver . . . until tomorrow.