We left the Foot of the Mountain motel for Denver via some viewpoints up the mountain (Artist Point, Panorama Point etc.) where a surprising amount of people were hiking given that the previous day was 4th July and everyone seemed to be out celebrating! The views were great though a bit cloudy and we even spotted a couple of deer.
On the way to Denver we stopped in Golden, where the Coors brewery is located, as we had loads of time to get to Denver and not that much to do. Golden is a lovely town and a great coffee or lunch stop – even though we didn’t make it to the brewery (I think it is fair to say Coors is not the greatest beer!).
Our next stop after Golden was Red Rocks Park & Amphitheater that is an absolutely amazing place to visit. Basically it is a music venue built into the natural rock formations and a lot of very famous bands play there. It was very hot by this point but we still spent a while there before moving on to Denver.
Once in Denver we checked in and though I was expecting to pay a small fortune for valet parking, the check-in clerk told me about some cheap parking just round the corner, which meant we ended up spending about an hour looking for said cheap parking! Once we found a cheap and safe place for the car we set off for a little walk and walker round the State Capitol and a few other areas before heading for 16th Street, which is the main drag for bars, restaurants and shops (or the main area close to where we were staying anyway). We ended up not doing too much walking and Denver was quite disappointing and we ended up glad that we were only staying one night. There was a crazy amount of homeless and/or dangerous looking people around the Capitol area that just made us feel uncomfortable, even though the rest of the town that we experienced seemed OK.
We started off at the Yard House where I finally had some Southwestern Egg Rolls (they call them Moo Shu Egg Rolls) that are basically like spring rolls but with a Mexican kind of twist. They were great, and contained chicken, chili cream cheese and veg and came with and a nice dip. The Yard House is a lovely looking bar with a great happy hour and massive selection of beers that we made the most of before wandering further down 16th.
It started raining quite heavily along out walk and we had to duck in and out of shops to stay dry – and there definitely wasn’t as many bars as I’d hoped! We made a pit stop at Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery before settling in at Henry’s Tavern where we watched the baseball, that we’d quite got into over the trip, and had a nice chat with a woman from New York.
Biltong and Burger 