To celebrate the glories of CHS fall break, we took the girls (well, C and L) to Denver to stay with S’s sister and her family for a few days.[1] We hadn’t been to Colorado since Christmas 2017, although we were scheduled to spend spring break there in 2020 until, well, you know…
We flew out Wednesday evening, returned Sunday morning/afternoon. Other than heavy fog causing us to sit at the gate for an extra 40 minutes before leaving Denver, we had no travel issues.
Thursday we headed down to Colorado Springs. Our first stop was a drive through and quick hike in the Garden of the Gods. I doubt these rock formations are quite as amazing as some of the more famous ones in Utah, but they also make less sense because they are far more isolated.
We were just a little behind schedule, thus the short hike. We went to the Broadmoor estate for lunch at the Golden Bee, which was very good.
After lunch we hit the Cave of the Winds Mountain Park for a cave tour. That was kind of freaky, especially for tall people. The girls were laughing at me after saying I was ducking way more than I needed on the tight passages. I told them it’s hard to get a 53-year-old, 6’2” body scrunched into a sub-four foot opening gracefully. We were most amazed by how and why people explored these 150 years ago. There is a part of the tour where they turn the modern lighting off and illuminate a large cavern with the type of candle-lamps they used in the 1880s. You can’t see shit. Maybe that’s how they explored so deep: when you can only see a few feet ahead you don’t realize one misstep could lead to a cold, lonely death.
The Broncos were playing Thursday night so we ordered pizza and stayed in to watch that. Mountain Time is pretty good for sports.
Friday we stayed in Denver. First we picked up our nephew, W, from his school, which had a half day. He’s a freshman at a Catholic school of about 725 students, and was able to give us a little tour. Then we hit the trendy Washington Park area to explore a bit and have a fantastic lunch at Perdida Kitchen. By far the best biria tacos I’ve ever had.
As a huge bonus we have good friends from Indy who are in the midst of a family relocation to Denver. One of S’s best friends from high school, K, who also happens to be L’s godmother, has two daughters who have taken nursing jobs in Denver. Because K and her husband are kind of crazy, after making a first visit to move the girls over the summer and falling in love with the city, they decided to rent their own condo for a year. K has been working from Denver off-and-on for the past month. Her husband C, who teaches at CHS and has our C in a class this year, has been coming out for weekends. He had promised us he would teach long enough to have his goddaughter in class when she is a senior, but we wonder if that’s still in the cards as they really seem to like Denver.
Anyway, we checked out K & C’s condo. Their daughters both have smaller places in the same complex. One was sleeping off an overnight shift so we only got to see her sister’s place.
Fun and kind of random.
Rain was moving in so we cut afternoon plans to walk around Wash Park more and instead checked out the Cherry Creek mall. Holy shit! Who knew there were still megamalls that were full of good stores? The girls spent a ton of time picking out clothes at Zara. After standing around letting them select and try on stuff for nearly an hour I finally discovered there was a Lucid showroom that I could have been hanging out in.
For our family activity that night the dads decided it was time all our kids watched Anchorman. None of them liked it as much as the dads did. Oh well…
Saturday we had to get up early to go watch our nephew play football about 30 minutes north of Denver. This is his first time ever playing football and he loves it. In the C game, he rarely comes off the field, playing a linebacker/safety hybrid on D and as a receiver on offense. He had a great tackle on defense and pancake-blocked a kid on a screen pass, which was awesome. However his team got blasted so that kind of sucked. Especially since it was early and cold.
Now, I could probably write 3000 words about this part of the game, so I’ll try to be brief. W’s team was down 26–0 in the third quarter and had done nothing on offense the entire game other than punt or turn the ball over before they connected on an 85 yard TD pass. However, one of the sideline refs threw a flag because W’s coaches ran onto the field and blocked the ref’s view during the run. Even though this ref had no call to make on the play. I see/hear sideline warnings called in pretty much every CHS game I’ve followed over the past seven years. The refs throw a flag, a sideline warning is announced, they pick up the flag, the play counts, and if it happens again there’s a penalty.
Maybe the rules are different in Colorado, but there was no warning Saturday. In a C game that was a blowout, a ref took away MHS’ only good play of the day. Even if I had no interest in the game, this would have been an insane call.
Well, as you can imagine, the MHS parents were not happy. One dad in particular, who was already an asshole before this call, cranked things up to 11. Or 111 actually. It was embarrassing even as a non-MHS parent how he would just not stop. My brother-in-law was ready to fight this guy because he was being such an idiot. The coaches came over and told him to shut up. The athletic director of the home school came over and asked him to pipe down. But he kept going. Literally 20 minutes of yelling before he finally took a walk around the track. Then when he came back he complained loudly to all of us again.
Makes me look forward to high school basketball cranking back up here in Indy!
We did not stick around for the JV game since W only played on kick coverage. Instead went took the 30 minute trip up to Boulder. I had never been there before so was excited. The only bummer was that the Flatirons were socked in with clouds until right about the time we left in late afternoon. While we were waiting for W and his dad, we walked around campus and downtown. Campus was deserted, it must have been CU’s fall break, too, so it was pretty lifeless. After W and my brother-in-law joined us we had a really good lunch at the West End Tavern on Pearl Street.
Our girls seemed to like Boulder. It is pretty funny to see the juxtaposition of these rich college kids – it’s over $60K/year for out of state students – with all the grungy, anti-establishment-ness of the full timers. And then it’s also a quasi-tech town. Just a lot going on. That’s true of any college town. Boulder is next level, though.
Then it was back to Denver, finally with clear views of the mountains from the car, for a chill evening. We had a very early flight home Sunday so focused on visiting while we watched football and got packed.
C had a cold the whole time, which was a bit of a bummer. My body is trying to decide if I’m catching it this morning.
Fun trip. We didn’t get the best of what Denver has to offer because of the clouds, but it’s easy to see why so many people flock there from elsewhere. Of course, with that comes a much higher cost of living than in the Midwest. Recently S and I have started thinking about what is next for us, in the 5–10 year window when the girls start cycling out of school and she can think about retiring from medicine. Where we end up will depend on where the girls land; we’d like to be centrally located if they spread out. We are both Midwesterners at heart and have a hard time seeing ourselves in certain parts of the country.[2] But Denver would be cool. Especially with family already there and some good friends with one foot out the door in that direction. That’s a long way away, though.