Things to do in Denver

...but not when you're dead.

At the end of April, Siobhan's going to a conference in Denver, and as we did last year in San Diego and in January in New York, we're both going, plus we're staying a few days after the conference. We just finally got approval to book the travel this week, so the trip, which has been on the back burner for a couple of months, is now officially on the schedule.

So we're trying to decide what we want to do while we're there. The city has the usual assortment of museums, theaters, historical sites, and parks. The science museum doesn't look like a good prospect, but we'll probably tour the U.S. Mint, the Firefighter's Museum, and maybe the zoo, botanical gardens, and aquarium. There's also an improv theater we might go to.

If you know Siobhan, you can imagine that she has a list of restaurants longer than the number of days there, and detailed analyses of the pros and cons of each, but I won't try to go into that. When we travel, I tend to take the food as if it were divine providence. Every time it's time for a meal, there's a place she's picked, and either I'll like it or I won't, but there's no point in worrying about it in advance. As long as we don't go to Casa Bonita.

We also intend to get outside the city. At very least, we'll do a day trip up into the mountains, perhaps heading towards Breckenridge, but we haven't picked any specific spots to go to. We might also head down towards Colorado Springs and Pueblo, and visit the Garden of the Gods, if we find other things in the area that seem interesting enough to make the day trip worth it. This is where our plans are fuzziest.

I'll have some time to spend while she's in the conference, but I don't know how much I'll try to get out and do. There probably aren't many attractions that would interest me and not her. One thing I might do is use the bike rental system; it's a very nice system where you can pick up a bike at any of dozens of automated stops, and drop it off at any other, but the rates are better suited to using them to get from place to place, than for touring. Lots of short trips can be done all day for $6, but one longer trip shoots the price up quite a bit. So it'd be more useful as a way to get specific places than just to ride around the parks, and since I don't likely have specific places to get to, it might not be that useful.