Welcome to Colorful Colorado: Denver!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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