Family Denver Trip

Last week, the family vacationed in Colorado. We spent a day in Denver at the beginning and end of the trip, but spent the majority of the time exploring Estes Park and the Rocky Mountain National Park. Going to split my retelling into two, with today’s post focused on the Denver components, both at the beginning and end of the trip. The next post has the mountain stuff.

Rental car snafu

Nothing says “Welcome to Denver” like standing around waiting for a rental car you already ponied up a grand for.

I’ve got member status at a certain rental car agency. Nothing fancy or anything. I never paid for it, nor does it represent my renting from them x number of times in a y-month period. About a decade ago, I was booking online and the reservation asked if I wanted free gold status. Uh, sure. Maybe it was just a great marketing ploy, because ever since then, I’ve scarcely rented from anyone else. Instead of finding the loyal customers and conferring them a status, they conferred said status thus creating said loyal customer.

One of the perks from this status is that I usually don’t have to go through any rigmarole when getting my rental. If it’s not at an airport, they just hand me the keys. At (most) airports, I skip the line entirely and go to a members section where I have . The keys are already in the car and all I have to do is show my i.d. to the guy at the exit gate and he prints out my contract. It works great, even if I’ve sometimes taken a car that’s a level above what I paid for and get the surcharge added on. Still, the lack of hassle is a major plus.

Unfortunately, if they’re going to give fancy status to any ol’ riffraff, sometimes we’re all going to arrive on the same flight.

When we got off the shuttle, some of the noobs were standing around, gathering their stuff, waiting in line. Knowing the drill, I found my name on the board, went to my designated section, and grabbed a car. In the back of my mind, I thought there weren’t nearly enough cars to accommodate the number of people who got off the shuttle in this special section. But no matter, I got mine, the riffraff can riffraff all they want. 

Although as we drove toward the exit, we wondered why we couldn’t get the brake light to go off. Kept futzing with the parking brake, which made “Park” go off and on, but “Brake” stayed illuminated the whole time. 

Turns out that meant the brake fluid was low. The guy at the checkout gate gave us three options: Keep the car and hope for the best, find an employee to top off the brake fluid, or go exchange the car for another one. None of these options seemed ideal. If we were just driving into Denver for an evening or two of walking around downtown, a little missing brake fluid wasn’t likely to harm anything. But the plan was to be driving hairpin curves at 11,000 feet elevation with a few thousand of those feet three inches to the right of the hairpin. Not a great place to find out precisely how low the brake fluid was. 

Find an employee wandering around the parking lot? Yeah right. They were all at the front of those thirty-deep lines of customers. 

So we took the option behind door #3 and drove back to the members spot, where no cars were available. So into the long line we went. Thirty minutes later, our names are added to the list of gold members waiting for cars to be delivered from the pleb area, where the non-special renters were having no issues.

In the meantime, we’d managed to stop another couple from driving off in the brake fluid car (partly to save their lives and partly because the car was technically still checked out to me until I could get a replacement). The other couple managed to get into a new car right away despite having showing up twenty minutes after us, because first-class had descended into the Wild West. There was no rhyme or reason. See a car, grab it, and hope it’s functioning well enough to get into town. 

When we finally got our replacement car, we had to wait for the rental agent to take me off the brake fluid car and on to this one, putting us a good two hours behind schedule. 

Oh, and every time we turned on the new car, it told us it was overdue for service. I know sometimes those messages get a little overzealous. They might trigger at 3,000 miles when most cars are fine far beyond that. But this overdue notice was a tad more extreme. To the tune of 6200 miles and 150+ days overdue. Even by the most magnanimous reading, that’s cutting it damn close to danger territory.

Clearly brake fluid wasn’t the only thing lacking in the eternal turn-and-burn that is airport car rental.

Good thing I didn’t need oil to drive those mountain passes. 

Curtis Hotel

The hotel we stayed in was a hoot and a half. It’s technically a Doubletree, but it doesn’t feel like one. But after reading this description, add in the fact that they give you one of those famous cookies when you check in.

Each floor was themed. I didn’t notice it at first, because we were on the “Floor of Champions.” Sure, it was technically sports themed, but it mainly consisted of oversized renderings of newspapers from when the Denver Broncos won back-to-back Super Bowls. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that in any Denver hotel. Hell, every spot in town was trumpeting the recent Nuggets NBA championship. If I walked out of an elevator and saw a picture of Nikola Jokic, I wouldn’t assume it to be a theme.

But the other floors had names like “Pedal to the Medal,” “Laugh Out Loud,” and “Chick Flick.” Oddly enough, they had not only a “One Hit Wonders” floor, but also floors devoted to Hair Bands and Disco. Seems the former would cover both of the latters.

Oh wait, the One Hit Wonders was actually the superhero floor. Holy shit, I hope they paid for the rights to all those Spiderman and Captain America visages, because Disney’s got good fucking lawyers. The Batman and Green Lantern stuff should be fine, though. HBO can’t even keep the shit they own on their own damn network.

They had a thirteenth floor, which many hotels don’t. To double down on this inclusion, it was the horror movie floor. Daughter gave that one a hard pass. If I ever return, I might opt for the video game floor, because I want to be able to play Pac-Man on the walls.

On our return trip to Denver, we requested the Sci-Fi floor, because you haven’t properly vacationed until you’ve exited your hotel room to a visage of Darth Vader on the commode.

The ground floor was similarly tongue-in-cheek, complete with a couch that looked like the back seat of a Cadillac. Its shop was called the five-and dime, while the restaurant (& martini bar) was called the Corner Office, and its food was top-notch. Since we were having breakfast there, I skipped the martini. I sought out their “Marco Polo Ballroom” half-expecting it to be a pool, but alas, it was simply a ballroom. 

And did I mention the Doubletree cookies?

Cannabis road signs

An awful lot of the road rental signs (you know the ones, where a local business pays “for litter removal,” although I’m pretty sure it’s just socially conscious advertising) were for local cannabis companies. There was also a dispensary approximately every other business in downtown Denver. It felt a little weird, traveling from the pot desert that is California.

Oh, you thought California legalized marijuana? Well sure, technically. But California also regulated the shit out of it, making someone who wants to sell the product legally have to jump through about 10,000 legal hoops and forms and whatnot. Meanwhile, California is also trying to lower its arrest numbers, particularly for over-indexed minorities, so one’s chances for getting punished for selling it illegally aren’t that high. As a result, illegal pot is still cheaper and more readily available than legal pot and the state has had to (I shit you not!) pass subsidies for legal dispensaries.

So yeah, it’s weird to see a state that actually legalized marijuana without fucking it up. Hell, I bet Colorado even gets tax revenue FROM the cannabis companies instead of sending tax revenue TO them. Who woulda thunk?

One other humorous byproduct: the signs pointing toward the Central Business District had to spell out “Central BD.” Because CBD is bringing in a lot more tourist dollars than the CBD.

Daughter

Are we sure the pre-teens don’t start at eight? My God, if this trip was a clarion call of the next decade of my life, then I foresee lots of booze. I suggest you buy some InBev stock. Maybe liver medicine, too. 

She’s discovered earbuds. In many ways, and at many times, they are a godsend. Not in the airplane, of course, like a functioning member of society. On the airplane, she yacked the whole damn way. But the second we need her to answer a question, or respond to stimuli, or, I don’t know, be marginally aware of the world around her, the earbuds are present and accounted for.

When we (finally) got into the rental car, she wanted to play navigator. Then she put her earbuds in because she “didn’t want to listen to SiriusXM, because we always listen to SiriusXM.” Of course, I didn’t notice, seeing as I was driving, so when we finished driving the nine miles that she gave on her last instructions, I asked, “Where to next?” “Hey, what are the new instructions?” “DAUGHTER,  IF YOU’RE GOING TO NAVIGATE YOU’VE GOT TO NAVIGATE!”

Daughter tags out one earbud. “Huh?”

Did I mention teenager? 

Although in all honesty if she were full teenager she wouldn’t want to play navigator. Instead, she’s entering that awkward Middle School Phase. I taught middle school for one (and only one!) year. It was my first year teaching full-time, and after doing all my student teaching and long-term subbing at high school, man, I struggled. An experienced teacher asked if I’d thought of putting up charts with the students’ names and then give them stars when they did what they were supposed to do. No… No, I hadn’t thought of that. That grade school shit never came up in my high school training. 

So, yeah, I could barely handle one year of that “acting older in the ways that don’t count but still like a baby in the annoying ways” before. Now I’m in for another half-dozen? 

Once Wife forcefully took the phone from her to take over navigating, Daughter returned to earbud la-la land. I know this because, when I excited the freeway she had no clue a deceleration was coming, meaning the open box of Cheez-Its she was mindlessly munching toppled over spilling all over the back legwell of the rental. 

If you need me before, say, 2030, you know where to find me. 

Baseball Game

The reason we picked this particular week for a Colorado trip was because my favorite baseball team, the Angels, were playing against the Rockies. We hoped that a team with some of the best sluggers of this generation might be exciting to watch in a ballpark known for homers. Boy, howdy!

The Angels ended up scoring 25 runs, which was the most in franchise history. The 25-1 final score was one of the top five margins of victory in the history of baseball. At first I was going to chastise Daughter, because she asked me to go get her water from the concession stand, and while I was gone the Angels hit back-to-back-to-back homers. Fortunately I didn’t miss all the action as they went on to score 16 runs that inning alone, sending 16 batters up that inning and another 11 in the following inning. 

Unfortunately, blowouts get kinda boring, even when it’s your team doing the blowout. Some of the stars we came to see were taken out of the game by the fifth inning. Still, props to a number of Rockies fans who stayed till the bitter end. If this game were happening in California, the fans would’ve left as soon as Mike Trout was benched.

Turned out to be a bad game for Daughter to learn how to keep score. She refused to move onto the next column when the team batted around, opting to just draw in new diamonds for a batter’s second time on the basepaths. The result was this M.C. Escher painting:

This wasn’t my first trip to Coors Field. Back in my single days, I regularly organized travel around seeing a new stadium. At one time, I was up to 60% of the ballparks, but that number has since dropped below the 50% mark. Coors Field is probably in my top five. I love the line of purple seats in the third deck signifying where the elevation is one mile above sea level. The trees in the batter’s eye (beyond the center field wall) fit Colorado’s outdoorsy feel. And when you sit on the first base side, you have a beautiful view of the Rocky Mountains towering over the stadium in the distance.

At least you used to have that view. Now they’re constructing high-rise apartment buildings just west of the stadium, right in the way of the mountains. All that damn pot revenue. Gotta build places for the loadies to live not far from downtown.

Fuck. Might have to revisit those ballpark rankings.

The Angels, of course, followed up that record-setting offensive output with a clunker to lose the series. And the series after that. Maybe spread the offense out over several games instead of putting it all in one? Although if you’re gonna go that route, I guess it was nice of you to do it in the game I was at.

Ninety minutes to kill

After we checked out of the Denver hotel, we were supposed to meet with my cousins who moved to the area a decade ago. By the time we coordinated with them we had about ninety minutes to kill.

It’s an awkward amount of time when you’re in an unfamiliar place. If it’s thirty minutes, find a Starbucks and steal some wifi. Two hours opens up everything from movies to museums. Two of the things on our list were the zoo and an interactive museum but neither of those seem worthwhile in that time frame, especially when you factor in taking 15-20 minutes to get there. 

So I did what travelers and tourists have done for centuries: googled “Denver kids.” Came back with Urban Air Park. It’s got trampolines and rock walls and shit and, even better, it’s on the way to my cousin’s house. 

On the way there we passed a TopGolf, which totally pissed me if because I love me some TopGolf and I really, really, really wanted to hit it from the third deck at mile-high elevation. Might finally hit that goddamn white circle. Unfortunately Wife had already purchased Urban Air tickets, so I guess Daughter playing Spiderman trumps me playing Tiger Woods. 

The Urban Air place was great, though. Daughter rode the zipline ten times in a row and probably would’ve went for two straight hours if we’d let her. Instead, we made her race the go-karts around one time before yanking her ass off to Family Fun Time, dammit!

Oh, and as it turns out we have one of these places about twenty minutes from where we live. Oops.

Zoo

When traveling, I try to avoid places I can go to at home. With a few exceptions, like the McDonald’s in Rome that’s something between a fine dining experience and a city unto itself. I’d rather eat something crappy and original than tried and true to offset the ninety percent of my existence where I go for the latter.

Not that I necessarily eat well on the road. I’m looking at you, Taco John’s. I’m open to fast food, as long as it’s fast food not available in Sacramento. Wife always thinks I’m joking when I say we need to go to a Waffle House whenever I see one. You wouldn’t find me anywhere near a Denny’s back home, but dammit, when on the road, Waffle House is great. I was happy when the Sacramento area got its first Cracker Barrel. Now I don’t have to eat there on the road. Nor at home.

Similarly, I was annoyed when I found out there was an Urban Air place back home. What a waste of ninety minutes. One might make the same argument about TopGolf, had we gone there, but I would’ve fired back with that whole hitting a golf ball at elevation isn’t the same. Either way, we didn’t go.

Not sure where the zoo fits in this spectrum. Each zoo has a different mix of animals, but at their heart, there ain’t much difference. Regardless, once Daughter heard there was a baby sloth, guess where we headed?

Unfortunately, we never saw baby sloth. We saw mama sloth, but she was way up in a tree. Whether or not she was holding her baby was hard to discern from down on the ground. Fortunately they had elephants, which we don’t have in Sacramento. But the lions and giraffes and marmosets looked the same. Two frogs were fucking, which was new, but they probably don’t provide that peep show for all the patrons.

The Denver Zoo also takes up a much larger geographic footprint than Sacramento, although Sacramento Zoo is planning on moving to a larger spot in the near future. Based on how exhausted I was at closing time (and the fact that it took half a day to make it around the zoo once), I’d like to put my vote in for it remaining in its nice cozy spot on the outskirts of downtown like it’s been for a century.

One complaint I have about the Denver Zoo is their map. The paths don’t reflect where the paths are in reality, and even the big map signs around the zoo rarely show “You are Here.” Furthermore, no animals were actually listed. Instead, they showed tiny photos of the animal’s face. Sure, some of them were easily distinguishable, like the elephants, but I scratched my head over a few of them. Is that a kangaroo or a horse? I can’t tell, and even if I could, I don’t know how to get there because the map says I’m at the hippopotamus, but that’s clearly a sheep. And the bathroom that’s supposed to be nearby is nonexistent.

The shitty map was probably by design to encourage us to download the app. The lady who gave us the map happily informed us that we could erase the app at the end of the day. Sure. And all it will take is being added to a permanent email list. How about you give us access to an online map that doesn’t require the name of my first-born child. Or, I don’t know, write out “Kangaroo” on the physical map, like zoos and amusement parks have been doing for decades.

Meow Wolf

Our final stop was… How do I describe it? It was… next to Mile High Stadium?

I don’t know what to call Meow Wolf. Art museum? Immobile stage show? Playground? It’s listed as an “interactive art exhibit,” so I guess we’ll go with that. It’s definitely not a museum, because you’re expected to touch it all. Not sure how artistic, per se, but it was definitely visionary. Perhaps they’re using artistic in the meta-sense, because I wouldn’t expect a ginormous sentient pizza at a Van Gogh exhibit:

You take the elevator (excuse me, “portal”) up to some weird alien world. Spaceships and space amoeba and… is that a space mermaid? Right next to the space unicorn with its head cut off . So I guess there’s no way to prove it was a unicorn, except by the neck tendrils. Sorry, I don’t have a picture of that one, but I was trying to avoid pointing it out for Daughter.

Once down on the ground floor, you’re in a standard sci-fi spaceport. You can call recorded messages via payphones (which Daughter had no understanding of), but they were hard to hear with all the other stuff going on. For the most part, we walked around confused for the better part of the first hour, playing some rat boxing and walking through some mirror mazes.

As you’re exploring, you go through a door (or a portal, or black drapes), and find yourself in a completely different setting. When I first did this, I thought we’d messed up and tried to double-back to “finish” section one, but by the time we finished I realized there’s lots of overlapping and crossing back and forth. The first “alternate world” we found was a post-apocalyptic street setting, where you can pose inside the broken down bus or any of the various eateries. I think this is where the sentient pizza place was, which somehow had a room with hypnotic lines:

If you pay an extra two bucks upon entry, which we did, you get a card that “collects memories” at kiosks. We found some of them, missed some of them, but eventually you start putting together a story about, I don’t know, some missing heroes or a conspiracy or something? If it wasn’t well past our bedtime on our last night in town, maybe I could’ve put things into a more logical order, although I assume it’s intentionally confusing on your first visit so you can come back other times focusing on one aspect or another. I thought we were looking for the missing heroes, but all our memories were about “The Convergence.”

This Meow Wolf (there are others in Vegas and a few other locales) is called Convergence Station. I assumed that was because of its location in Denver, near the train station, underneath the interstate, right next to the football stadium. But “Convergence Station” has to do with the storyline. These different worlds or dimensions have converged together, and the memories you’re collecting tell the story of how that convergence happened. There’s also a whistleblower trying to figure out why it happened. Or maybe trying to undo it? Not sure, because by the time we figured out what was going on, we had been there close to two hours and it was almost closing time. Maybe if we had done this on day one, when our internal clocks were still on Pacific Time, or on a day we hadn’t spent five hours walking around the zoo without a cloud in the sky, we cut our losses with only two of the four convergences unlocked.

So sorry, mermaid. I feel like there was something I was supposed to do with you through the viewfinder, but your puzzle will remain unsolved for now.

Pictures

I didn’t find too many out-of-context or wtf pictures this go around. In fact, both of the mildly humorous pics were probably intentional. The first came from the scoreboard at Coors Field during an inning break. When it’s a double-digit blowout, maybe they scrape the barrel for more entertaining factoids. Or maybe they just figured we’d all be gone by then. Regardless, props to this formerly employed person.

The other might seem more legit until I tell you I found it in the Meow Wolf bathroom. But I saw it before we had entered the “portal.” Had I seen it at the end, it would’ve been the most normal vision of the past two hours. Even now, the fact that the cell phone is on it makes it look legit. Even the rubber ducky is something one might drop into a urinal. I can’t be the only one who brings my rubber ducky out on my adventures in town, can I? But man, leave that with someone else when you’re peeing. Where they finally lost me, or grabbed my attention and necessitated the picture, is that third object. Peeing off of a moving bicycle sounds fun, but I highly doubt you’d accidentally drop it in the urinal.

That’s all I’ve got for today. The plan is to be back early next week with stories of Estes Park and the Rocky Mountain National Park.

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