This time the Main Street In Motion tour has brought me to Denver Colorado. Our driving show is taking place at the Invesco Field at Mile High. I have never been to Colorado before so I was looking forward to seeing the place. Although I dont like being away from my family for expended periods, it is neat to see new places. I would just enjoy seeing these places more if I could have my family with me.
Not being a sports guy, I had no idea what sport "Invesco Field" was for. But once I got there I saw the store out front that was selling Denver Bronco's merchandise. So then I knew....It's a hockey arena.
Just messing, I did know that they are a football team.
Here are a few views of the stadium from the outside. I haven't yet had the opportunity to go inside, but I'm still hopeful that I may get to check out the inside.
The mile high walkis a sidewalk that goes all the way around the stadium. A lot of people come there to run, walk, rollerblade and cycle.
The route is going to be off site, but its just on a perimeter road around the stadium so other traffic should be pretty light. The route is one mile long which is what we typically try to go for.
I determined where we would need signage on the route and then went back to the tent to set up the stanchions and the staging area.
The Volt tent is set and ready to go.
With the set up being pretty much finished, and still having tomorrow to do the final touches, I decided to go check out the city a little bit.
It only to about five minutes to get to the downtown area from the stadium. I was surprised at how clean the city was. There is not a lot of trash on the streets and the buildings look well maintained. Not that I am a city connoisseur by any means, I just thought it was a nice city.
In my travels I came across an arena looking thing called the pepsi center. Judging by the giant banners hanging out front, I'd say they play basketball here...
I'm sure my children will know who some of these players are, but I haven't a clue. I don't even recognize them by their names on the banners. Oh well, It just isnt my thing.
I didnt spend a lot of time in the city, just enough to see a few things and take some pictures.
I headed back to the hotel for the night. We are staying at a Residence Inn again. I like the Residence Inn because they have a full kitchen in the rooms (I talked about that in a previous post) and they also have a happy hour at the main lobby where they serve dinner and drinks, FREE! The down side is that they only do these dinners Monday through Thursday, so we only get two nights of free dinners. But I'll take what I can get. Also they have a pretty good hot breakfast every day too.
The rooms are nice and clean and the staff is always nice, so I have no complaints about the Residence so far. Also, the hotel is right next to the city so its close to anything you may need or want.
Thursday I went to the site first thing in the morning and got started with finishing the set up. Also Thursdays are the day that I have to do truck demo's for the GMC dealers. The demo is typically around 2:30pm.
The crew was finishing the set up for the rest of the event and when they were finished I took a few shots from one of the upper parking lots.
The big white tent to the right is registration. The larger tent to the left is the VIP tent. just behind it, the smaller white tent is where they have snacks and drinks for the customers as well as a couple of Xbox and Playstation stations. In the back you can see the tops of the Chevy tent and the Buick/GMC tent.
I always think its cool how they turn an empty parking lot into a small city in just a couple of days. It's really cool to see all the different groups that have to work together to accomplish this set up.
I found these two guys who seem to have made this corner their home. They have been in this same spot for the past two days.
I took a couple of pictures of the city from the site. As you can see, we're really close. I came back later that night to take a couple pictures after the sun when down. I like city lights at night.
This was atop a church that I passed by on the way to the stadium to take the night pictures. I thought it looked neat.
This is a tower at the amusement park located in between the site and the city. You can see the roller coaster in the pictures above. What I thought was cool about this tower is that it changed colors about every ten seconds......
My night time photography skills leave a lot to be desired. Mostly because I have no clue how to take pictures. I have a VERY capable camera thanks to my wife, I just don't know how to use it yet, but I'm trying. The tower looked really cool in person. As it was changing colors it was like your eyes were playing tricks on you.......
.........But I really like the night shots of the city. I cant wait until I figure out how to make them really good.
Event day one went really good. The weather was awesome. It was in the seventies all day. Our preregistered attendance for the event is around 3500 people, most of them are registered for Saturday. So today, Friday, was kind of light but not horrible when compared to other cities. But tomorrow, on the heavy day, they are calling for temperatures in the 40's with rain and snow! REALLY! OMG, I am OVER cold weather. But we'll just have to wait and see what happens. Some of the locals here have said that the weather in this particular spot is very hard to forecast.
After work on day one I had a thought.......Colorado is kind of known for having some really cool off roading. I just happen to have a Chevy Tahoe 4x4 as my rental car. I asked one of the locals at the event, "how far is it to get to a place where I could do some off road driving?" He said I could be there in about thirty minutes. That's close enough for me! So directly after work I hopped in my rental and headed out West on route 6 as the guy suggested.
It was a beautiful drive through the mountains..............
The two pictures above look very fuzzy but the reality is that it's snowing. And it's snowing sideways due to the blowing wind. This I am assuming is the front of the storm that is supposed to his us tomorrow.
As I got higher the temperature was really dropping. It was 68˚ when I left Denver.
The drive was nice but I was getting a little disappointed, I had been driving for about thirty minutes and no sign of anywhere to go off road.
Then I came to a town off to my right called Central City and at the end of the exit ramp there was a welcoming sign.............
From the highway I could see in the distance of this town there looked to be a lot of non paved roads for me to explore so I drove down to the city and figured I would start there and work my way out of town until I hit dirt.
It turns out that this was a little casino town. And when I say little, I mean little. Like, there was ONE street that had several casinos on it and that was it.
It was a cool looking little town. Very historic looking to me. It's also one of the smallest towns I have ever been in that I can think of.
As it turns out, the whole town is only 1.9 square miles with a population of less than 600 people. So yea, I'd say that qualifies as a small town. It used to be a mining town, hence all of the cool off road trails.
The town is 37 miles from Denver, but I had climbed and additional 3,216 feet vertically. Denver starts at 5280 feet and Central City is at 8,496 feet.
I passed through the town and it only took about five minutes to hit unpaved roads.
I rode around for a couple of hours just exploring the area. Here is a picture that shows the paths I took.....
The green lines are the paved roads through the town and the blue is off road.
The off road was far from extreme, but that's a good thing considering I was all alone and I didn't really need to damage the rental..............too much.
Here are some pictures from my little journey..........
My first little hill climb
The clouds were starting to look kind of ugly. I was actually hoping it would start snowing very heavily. It would have made for great pictures as well as some fun driving.
Ya gotta find at least one spot to get some tires off the ground.
You can see some of the snow still on the ground
Some very mild rocks to go over. It went over no problem.
I also had the chance to see some deer. they were quite interested in me, but not interested enough to let me get real close.......
One last look :-)
I stayed until it started to get dark and the truck was a little muddy. I figured in the dark I wouldn't be able to take good pictures and more importantly I may not be able to find my way out.
Getting back to the hotel in Denver was quick and easy. Being that I had already driven the main dirt road in, I kind of knew where it went. So of course I had to "challenge" it a bit on the way out :-)
Once I hit the asphalt I was back at the hotel in 35 minutes.
When I got up Saturday morning I was expecting it to be pretty ugly out due to the forcast. I looked out the window and it was clear and sun shining. YESSSSSS!
However, after walking out the door it was clear that it was much prettier INSIDE because it was about 35˚ outside. Brrrrr. So on went the long sleeve Under Armour shirt.
When we got to the site it was so windy that fencing was blowing over. Other stuff was blowing around as well, it was ugly. On top of that, several trailers and other items had been graffitied over night. Security managed to catch two of the five guys that were doing the tagging.The crew used gasoline and was able to clean up the graffiti pretty quickly.
Before things got going, as small wager was placed by one of the women on our team to two other women on our team. the wager was a $5 bet that the two women wouldn't climb on the horse statues out front of the stadium. the horses in this picture here...
Now let me just say that these horses are HUGE and they are mounted in a faux river, so the base is all water.. But there are rocks around that they could use to get to them.
So, the two ladies decided to accept the challenge and climb on. Unfortunately I did not get a picture, but the truth is, the audio would have been better. We, the smart ones of the group, stayed at our course while these ladies went to mount the horses, but we could easily see them fro where we were.
One of them managed to make it on the back of one of the horses. Then all of a sudden things seemed to get frantic. We couldn't tell what was going on. It looked like maybe she was stuck on the horse or something. The two ladies seemed to wrestle around for a minute and then the one who was on the horse was finally off. At this point they both came running back. Apparently what happened was, as she got on the horses back, a voice came over a loud speaker saying "Please stay off the horses!" Ha ha ha ha. How funny is that. Apparently security was watching the whole thing on a camera. ha ha ha.
So after the silliness we got started. The event went very well and the weather got very nice. The wind slowed down and the temp. came up a little with the sun being out. It never got nice enough to take off the jacket, but it was WAY WAY better than what had been forecast.
As a result the turn out was pretty good. They said we did around 680 people on the first day, so we possibly did 900 today.
After work today it was straight back to the hotel and just chill.
One more day to go here in Denver.
I'll follow up with an event final post in a couple of days. Remember, If you click on the pictures they will go to full size.
Until then, stay safe and God bless.
--------------Continued---------------
The last day of the event in Denver was slow for sure but at least the bad weather held off. It was a bit cool but not too bad.
After the event a few of us got together and went for dinner in downtown. We intended on one place, but ended up in another. The place we originally wanted to try was closed so we ate at a place that happened to be right across the street from where we parked, McCormick's Fish House.
The place was awesome. Nice atmosphere and great great food. I had Grilled swordfish.
Bill and Heidi had a crab bisque that they claimed was the best soup they'd EVER had. I also finished off Bill's sushi and it was GREAT too. We had a good time over dinner. It's nice to kick back after the event and just relax.I hate being away from my family so it's nice to hang out with good people and enjoy a meal.
After dinner I decided to go take a few more pictures of the city. I'm not good with pictures at night for sure, but I'm trying.
While we were at dinner we got the news that Bin Laden had been killed. Great news, but now I was worried about what it was going to be like at the airports.
At the airport the next morning it was fine. Nothing appeared and more strict than usual.
I'm looking forward to spending a couple days at home before I head off to Indianapolis.
JM
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