Tuesday:
I woke up and was able to have some bagels and coffee that they set aside in the kitchen for their guests. This airbnb was really nice and very well organized. While in the kitchen, I met another girl from Chicago that was staying in the Airbnb room at the back of the house. She didn't have much of a plan this morning, and I had decided that I was going to head to the capitol for a free tour, so she decided to come along and we drove there since she had a car. She got it through this car website thing that is basically like airbnb but for cars - it's called Turo. I may have to look into that, it's very intriguing!
The Tour of the Colorado State Capitol was very informative and a great introduction into the state of Colorado. Now I'll list a few of the interesting tidbits and facts I learned. The Colorado State Flag has blue for blue skies, red for their dirt/earth (Red Rocks, anyone?), yellow for the sun (300 days of sunshine), and white for the snow-capped mountains. Colorado became a state in 1876, which seems like not a huge fact, but it's something I (and I am assuming most of you) did not know. Their senate and house sessions only last from January to May, which I don't know a lot about those things but it seems pretty short. I think that's the way to do it. Work crazy for 6 months and then be done the other six months :) At the end of the tour, we were able to climb up into the dome and see a view of the mountains and it was so clear we could even vaguely see Red Rocks! Very cool and beautiful - the weather I had the whole time in Colorado was perfect, especially for early April.
After lunch at First Draft, I walked just a short distance to Epic Brewing Company, which luckily wasn't too busy at one in the afternoon on a Tuesday :) They had some interesting beers on tap and I liked the big warehouse space of a brewery. Next I walked back to my Airbnb to pick up my luggage and then I was off to find my home for the next couple of nights, a "vacation home" rental that I found on Booking.com, that is basically a really fancy airbnb. It was with Stay Alfred in these beautiful, modern apartment buildings downtown. We were on the 25th floor! SO COOL! Our room had two big walls full of windows and lots of space for only the 3 of us who were staying there.
After we settled in a bit, we decided to grab dinner and I chose for us to go to Rebel Restaurant, another place in the RiNo district that I had read was good. It must have been too early for Denveronians (what is the word for them?) to be out for supper, because there was no one there! But the food was great, lots of unique dishes that were mostly served tapas-style! They change their menu often, but a few of the items we had were spinach-style pierogies, something with eggs, flatbread, feta, etc., sweet potato churros, cubano yaki doughballs - honestly I can't read most of my reading, but everything was good! There was also a happy hour going on so these were all half-price! Hell yeah!
Next, we headed to Stem Ciders where we met up with some other people, one of them being my friend Sally from NOLA who was also here for the conference! I'm not the biggest cider fan, but it was fun to go someplace different and plus, they had some interesting ones, they weren't all sweet! I've been to a few cider houses, and I still gotta say that my favorite is Arsenal Cider House in Pittsburgh - their ciders aren't sweet at all and almost wine-like. Plus, they have a sorbet of the week/month with one of their cider flavors - genius! If you're ever in Pittsburgh, check it out. Or better yet, ask me about other places I love from there. I'm visiting again soon! Okay, got side-tracked! Back to Denver :)
Once the rest of the people went back to their hotels, Sally and I went on to another brewery (this area has SO many) called Our Mutual Friend Brewing and tried all 8 of their beers, which were pretty solid. It was a nice little tap room that allowed dogs in, which is always a nice touch - not that I have a dog, but hope to some day! The employees there were nice and even gave us a tip for a place to eat late-night with $5 wood-fired pizza, called Cart-Driver. It was perfect and cheap and the place was real small and cozy and smelled VERY heavily of a campfire, which was cool except for my hair and clothing smelled like it for awhile. Lyfts were CRAZY cheap here, so except for a bit of walking sometimes, I took them constantly!
Wednesday:
First conference day and so I'll obviously only talk about the non-conference things that I did :) For breakfast we went to Syrup which was just around the corner from our apartment building. They had lots of different kinds of syrups, hence the name of the restaurant, but I ended up not having time to try any of the others. The "apps" were HUGE or so I learned after I made the mistake of getting both pigs in a blanket AND a waffle sandwich. I would definitely go back again, because what I had was tasty! Later in the evening we went to a dinner hosted by a library-related company at Charcoal, a fancier restaurant in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. We had a 3-course dinner and everything was SO good. The entree I had was the morel mushroom brodo - a fantastic meal :)
Thursday:
For breakfast on Thursday, we took the bus over to the Denver Biscuit Company because I just couldn't resist a place dedicated to biscuits, plus it was highly rated. The menu looked fantastic and from what I had (The Dahlia - sausage, apple butter, fried egg, and maple syrup, and a biscuit cinnamon roll to go), it was exactly what I hoped for. The cinnamon roll biscuit was MASSIVE and so I split it for breakfast the next day, and it was very good. Highly recommend this place. It turns into a pizza place and bar later, which I think is really cool.
I was on my way to a library-related party at Wynkoop Brewing, when I decided to stop off first at Great Divide - I had to. They are one of the few breweries in Denver that I had heard of and it was close to the apartments. I tried a few heavy hitters of beers and they were pretty good, but now it was time to "party" at Wynkoop. The beer at Wynkoop was just okay but the brewery itself was awesome!! This would be a great brewery to hang out at because of it's many floors and different bar games to play. It had at least 8-10 pool tables, a couple of shuffle boards, and dart boards. They had free tours going on for us librarians and it was a short tour, but neat because they took us down in the basement of this old building - it used to be some type of warehouse in 19th century Denver.
Around lunch time on this day, we had a 2-hour break, so Sally and I took a Lyft back over to the RiNo district to The Source, a place with a few restaurants and local food shops in it, as well as Crooked Stave (Artisan Beer Project) - the highest rated brewery in Denver. You didn't expect me to pass this place up, did you? I could see why they are so highly rated right away, and it's because they had mostly sours on tap, which I love! We chatted with a guy a bit while we were there - he's also a librarian, but academic, and he's there with his wife who is a public librarian. He just came along for the trip and is hopping around to different breweries and such while she's at the conference - nice. We needed a quick lunch to bring with us so we grabbed a sandwich at a place in The Source, called Mondo Market. I don't remember what I got, but it sure was good. I'm not always a fan of getting a deli sandwich (there are usually better things to eat IMO), but this sandwich was good!
After the conference was over for the day, I walked over the river to the other side, past Coors Field where the Colorado Rockies were having their opening game. It was nuts over there, but I just walked right on past to where it was quieter. My destination was the speakeasy-style bar called Williams & Graham. The "speakeasy" part of it was that it was behind a non-descript bookcase in a random open shop. It was insanely dark in there and it took awhile to get used to the lighting. I sat at the bar and what I really loved about this place was the first thing the bartenders did was introduce themselves and ask your name - a great personal touch! I first ordered a whiskey drink (no surprise there because it's my go-to for cocktails) and then another "classic" gin drink. Gin is the one liquor that I'm not a huge fan of, so I am trying to get myself into it. Both drinks were pretty good and it was a great atmosphere, albeit too dark.
Now it was back to the apartment to pack up and luckily, the Greyhound station was literally across the street as I was running a bit late. Now, it was onto Colorado Springs, where I have spent the majority of my visits in Colorado visiting family, I was meeting up with my cousin Amanda, and her husband Colten, who I hadn't seen it about 2-3 years! Boy, was the Greyhound experience a very "typical" Greyhound experience in the way that those buses can be in areas where people don't take buses or trains often (AKA anywhere but the East Coast). I was 99% positive I sat next to someone very high on drugs. Oh well, it was the only way to Colorado Springs and it wasn't a very long trip!
Amanda and Colten picked me up at the station and we immediately went to one of their favorite restaurants, The Burrowing Owl, where I ordered a delicious sounding sloppy joe (which I haven't had in FOREVER) and the "mother" a whiskey drink they told me I HAD to get. Both were very yummy! So here I am just eating my food in this divey-type bar (hipster-like though too) with very typical bar fare (heavy on the sloppy joes, though) and then they tell me that everything here is VEGAN. It's a vegan dive bar, and it's amazing! I'm pretty horrible at knowing the difference between my meats and clearly not meats, so I had no idea. I'm ridiculous. The green chile sloppy joe fooled me! Amanda and Colten recently (in the last year or so) opened up a yoga studio in CS called Yoga Studio Satya and they showed me it that night. It's beautiful, and I couldn't wait to take a class in it the next day :) Afterwards I went home to my aunt's place to stay (she was unfortunately out of town).
Saturday:
I woke up a little bit earlier on Saturday to look through a bit of the genealogy stuff that my Aunt had left me. Years ago, my mother was HUGE into genealogy and all of her research is at my Aunt's now, so I wanted to take a bit of a look before I went off to do the Yoga Wall class at their studio. I HAD to include some photos of an example of this class, because it's unlike anything I've ever done in yoga and I really liked it. Look for the pics down below.
While Amanda finished up up with her classes, I drove back to my aunt's place to shower, and then headed back out and made a stop at a local brewery called Great Storm Brewing and had a couple of sample sizes of beers, they were pretty decent and instead of giving me a tasting flight, they gave me the sample sizes and then you could write on the bar with colorful dry-erase markers to say which was which. Pretty cool. Then I met up with Amanda and Colten at the studio so we could drive to their favorite Thai place called Chaang Thai where I had the Khow Soy (Northern-style egg noodles with curry sauce). Very filling and tasty.
Next we drove around the Garden of the Gods a bit and then back to their place to hang out with their adorable animals (two dog and two cats) and then off to their friends house for his birthday and drinks and tacos. Lastly, we grabbed pints of Ben and Jerry's to take back while watching some TV - don't remember the last time I did that, and it was nice. Just a very chill day. That's the great thing about traveling do a place you've been before.
Of course there's always room to do something new in a place you've visited before, so Sunday was reserved for going to the Cave of the Winds. But first, I stopped at Amanda and Colten's place for some breakfast - delicious acai bowls! So healthy and honestly really tasty! Then we were off to the Cave of the Winds and the Lantern tour. It was a 1.5 hour tour through these caves with only the light of our lanterns! What was really crazy about this place and tour is that when people first discovered the caves in the late 1800's/early 1900's (can't remember when), people actually lived down here. Creepy. I think I've only done one cave tour before, the Jewel Caves in South Dakota, but I would definitely recommend this. It's pretty cool! Just before we left I bought a few pieces of jewelry in the gift shop - I'm trying to be more of a jewelry person, nothing expensive of course!
Amanda and Colten were going to drop me off at the airport but we had quite a few hours before that needed to happen, so we drove up to Denver a bit early. We were going to go to the Natural History Museum because it was free that day, but apparently everyone else decided to as well and it was almost impossible to get in and find parking. As we were looking for parking, we ended up right next to the Denver Zoo and so decided to go there instead. This was a perfect little change of plan. I hadn't been to a zoo in quite awhile and it's always fun to see animals. I could watch monkeys all day, honestly!
Lastly, we said goodbye :( And I was at the airport, but then my flight was delayed and I didn't get back to my house until 4am. FUN TIMES. But really, my trip was grand and I'm always thinking about the next time to visit Colorado!