Mini-blog: A Day in Denver

I’m spending a long weekend with my sister-in-law in Colorado Springs, which might sound more exotic than it is. Normally, people go to Colorado Springs to go see the amazing Garden of the Gods or ride the cog rail up to Pike’s Peak. There’s the Air Force Academy and the Olympic Training Center too. The upside of having a sister far away is that you get to visit that cool place a few times, and I’ve been able to do all of the above in the past—Colorado Springs has lots to offer.

This time around, though, I’m just here to hang out with Julie. And Julie is a working mom with a couple of young kids, so life is busy! While she’s been working, I’ve been running some errands—getting boots for her daughter, dress shoes for her son for the Christmas concert, etc.

Generally, when I travel somewhere, I find it sort of depressing when I see that I could go to all the same stores and restaurants that I could visit at home. However, when you are running errands, this simplifies things. I know that the boots we needed would be at Famous Footwear, and the dress shoes and boot spray would be at Payless. So it made things very efficient. But not exactly worthy of a travel blog!

Then there was yesterday. The kids only have a half day on Fridays, so we picked them up and headed to Denver, where it was the first day of their German-style Christkindl Market. We took the light rail in from an outlying area and disembarked at Union Station.

Union Station is Denver central train station, originally built in 1881, and it was recently renovated.  
The second floor rings the lobby and is made up of hotel rooms. The first floor has shops around a lovely old lobby that is now sparkling. We got ice cream and coffee and sat in the lobby to watch people and check it out. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos, so I have to depend on this photo from a random architect's website that I googled.

After that we walked the 16^th street mall, a pedestrian area, and made our way to the Christmas market. There were probably 20 booths with items from all over the world. There were ornaments and baked goods and German lace and alpaca goods from Central America and nesting dolls from Ukraine. The shopkeepers for the last place are from eastern Ukraine and come every year for this. The nesting doll assortments included a set of Russian authors, American presidents, characters from Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and even the members of the group One Direction. For real.

When we finished at the market we noticed there was a Money Museum at the Federal Reserve branch very near, and it was free. I would have been sorry to have paid for that, but since it was free, oh well. It turns out I’m not terribly interested in monetary policy or the Federal Reserve. This should come as a surprise to no one. But one corner showed different U.S. money dating back to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and some other interesting things. During the Civil War they switched to “paper coins” to avoid using important metal for money.

We made the most of the incredibly comfortable, taxpayer-supplied chairs that were available for watching a video I paid no attention to, and then we went in search of dinner. Again, very nearby was Sam’s No. 3 Diner. Sam’s had the usual burgers and breakfast foods of any diner, but they also offered Greek food, Mexican food, and their specialty chili. Everything we ordered was really good and in no short supply. My niece ordered French toast and it was WAY more than she could eat.

After dinner, the lights were on all over the pedestrian mall. And it was time for, of course, another restaurant. We weren’t hungry—this was more of a destination restaurant. One that purportedly serves really terrible food. Casa Bonita is unlike any place I’ve ever been. It’s sort of an institution in Denver, and even though it started as a chain in Oklahoma City, the Denver location is the only one left.

Casa Bonita is hard to describe. In the midst of a rather dilapidated strip mall, in a shopping district heavy on pawn shops, marijuana dispensaries, and massage parlors, a shining beacon rises in the night. It sticks out as an oasis in a sea of degradation. (Getting a little poetic there.) It is part  Rainforest Café (but it existed before that) and part Epcot Center—it attempts to emulate a Mexican colonial plaza. But where Epcot’s Mexico pavilion would try to stick to things that are truly Mexican, Casa Bonita adds their own, tacky flair.

In addition to offering what is described all around as terrible food, this place is crawling with entertainment opportunities. Every half hour a cliff diver comes out and performs several dives into a pool of water. This is an activity attributed to Acapulco. Okay, that’s sort of Mexican, maybe. And a guitarist plays and sings Mexican-style (as far as I know) music, accompanying himself on about 5 other instruments.

But then two not-very-Mexican looking men who have a fake gunfight, and there is some sort of staged event that features a couple on an Indiana-Jones type adventure who encounter a headhunter in a tiki-strewn path. More “Brady Bunch” in Hawaii than anything else. There is an idol involved; I was waiting for the tarantula to make an appearance, or possibly someone to almost drown surfing in the pool of water, but those things did not occur.

So they stray from their Mexican theme. If those options aren’t enough, you could crawl with a child through a haunted cave, there are periodic pinatas to bat at, you could get your picture taken in Old West clothes (for a price), and there is an arcade. It’s huge, and there were a ton of people.

Since we’d already eaten and the food isn’t good, we just wanted to get dessert there so I could see this place. However, it turns out you have to order a meal or pay an admission price. We had taken the light rail and then walked kind of a long way, so we just paid the admission fee. Happily, this includes free drinks, free chips and salsa, and their sopapillas for dessert. It also involves skipping the long food line. Perfect.

This gloriously cheesy place, along with the other places we visited that day, was a welcome antidote to shopping centers full of all the same Targets, Costcos, Sam’s Clubs, Starbucks, Qdobas, etc. etc. that I can get to when I turn out of my home neighborhood onto 28^th street.

Long live the cheesy, tacky, unique places of the world. Now back to my regularly scheduled errand running.

FYI: If you are traveling to Denver with young children, we have visited several fun places in the past. The Denver Firefighters Museum, the Hammond’s Candies factory tour, and the Denver Zoo are some great places to take the littler ones.