Day 16 – Wheat Ridge, CO, Golden, CO, and Denver, CO

Miles driven today: 32 Cumulative miles: 3626 We woke up at 8:30am and got ready. We pulled out the laptop so we could figure out our plans for the rest of the day and let Daniel’s cousins know when we would be at their place in Butte, Montana. In the process, we decided we would take it easy while visiting Dave and Amanda and stay a day longer than we had originally planned. This would allow us to see Dave a little more since he ended up having to work all weekend and is trying to stay caught up on school work, too. Since we took out two nights by modifying our trip earlier on, we’ll still be getting home a day early, which means we’ll have next Friday night to sleep in our own bed and won’t have to leave until Saturday afternoon/ evening to go camp at Mt. St. Helens before doing the Rim climb on Sunday. With all that figured out, we let the house around 10:45am and drove the short distance to Coors Brewery, CO. I had been on the tour before when I was much younger; Daniel had never been on a large scale brewery tour, only microbrew tours (as are most prominent in the northwest). The tour is free and you get three samplers at the end of the tour (not a full ping of course, but about 10 oz. Glasses). They didn’t have Keystone (can’t say I was disappointed about that) or Molson, but they did have a variety of other beers including Killean’s Irish Red (which they bought and didn’t change the recipe) and two Blue Moon beers (whose recipes were developed by Coors Master Brewers). We learned that Coors uses hops from Washington State; that the facility is very environmentally friendly – they recycle everything they can and make animal feed pellets from the mash (they can produce 500 tons per day); that Coors made malted milk during prohibition in order to keep the factory open and keep the workers employed; that employees get two beers after each shift; and that the wellness center/ gym also has beer on tap. At the end of the tour, Amanda, Daniel, and I each enjoyed a beer or two (actually, the klutz that I am, I spilled most of mine on the table) and went to the gift shop to buy our tickets for Elitch Gardens, an amusement park in Denver. After leaving Coors, we made a lunch stop at Chipotle and then went to Elitch’s. When I’m at an amusement park, I instantly become a kid again and get super excited about the rides – especially roller coasters. Amanda is the same way and Daniel likes roller coasters a lot, too. Of the six roller coasters at Elitch’s (it isn’t a huge park), we went on five of them. There’s one where the roller coaster cars are attached to the track at the top and your lower legs and feet dangle, another that goes forward and then takes you backwards through the course, a wooden coaster, a loop-dee-loop coaster, and a coaster where you essentially lay on your stomach looking forward, a la superman (this one twists and turns and goes upside down, too). We also went on the Tower of Doom, which is a free fall from several stories up. I also had the bright idea of going on the wettest water ride in the park. At least we did it early enough in the day that we were mostly dry by the time we headed to the car, but not early enough to freeze as the evening began to set in. After several rides, some funnel cake, and plenty of obnoxious high school cheerleaders (apparently it was Rally Day at the park and there were hundreds of cheerleaders wearing some incarnation of their uniform – from full game uniforms to personalized warm-ups), we got to the house about 8:00pm. We changed into warmer clothes and headed out for good Mexican food about 9:00pm. Dave drove us around for a while after dinner so we could see the city lights at night. We went to Lookout Mountain where you could see the Coors brewery in Golden and see the lights of Denver. He also took us to the parking lot of a church up on a hill close to where he grew up. He used to come up here with his friends to hang out and talk. We did just that as it was starting to rain and was too cold to get out of the car. We finally got back to the house about 11:45pm and all went to bed as Dave has to be to work early in the morning. Wildlife seen: cheerleaders (I figure they must count as they are unpredictable and it is safest to view them from a distance) Miles hiked/ walked: est ~3.0