The Mile High City - Denver - you won’t notice the elevation when you approach the city from the East. Many people first connect Denver to montains and skiing, which is only partly true. First of all, when you approach the city, as we did yesterday by plane, it’s flat land, prairie land, agriculturally used (to be seen from the air as huge mostly circular fields). Could be somewhere in Kansas or Oklahoma as well – if there wouldn’t be the majestic snow-covered mountain chain to the back, the Rocky Mountains. And this makes Denver a hub for winter sports: slopes and trails just about 1/2 or 1 driving hour away. In the mountains there are ski areas in abundance, much more enticing, larger, less crowded than most Europeans can imagine.
When we flew in, the city offered us a great, colorful „welcome“: a beautiful sunset. No snow on the grounds, just the lakes and creeks were still frozen. In contrast to New York City (we changed planes in Newark) it looked and later feeled very spring-like in Denver. In NYC: snow and only 10 deg. F. Even the Hudson River, which we followed by plane, was almost completely frozen! Denver Airport is architecturally spectacular, a tent-like building immitating several mountain tops planned by Diego Calatrava,the famous Spanish architect. Unfortunately it was too dark already to take a picture.
Last weekend we were still anxious about our drive to the Airport and about our flight because of all the snow and ice on the roads we had in Bavaria. Well, all went amazingly smooth, our drive over to MUC Airport took us not quite an hour, all planes were on time – at this time of the year mostly frequented by business people. We had a layover in EWR of about 2,5 hours, but that didn’t matter, considering the 8,5 + 4 hours flight time in total. Touchdown in Denver was at 6 pm local time and - since the Airport is quite a bit out of town (about 25 mi.) and since we decided to take a shuttle bus, it took us till 8 pm until we arrived.
In our pre-arranged hotel, the Curtis (boutique) Doubletree Hotel in downtown Denver, we got a nice, large room, very fancy and colorfully designed, with free internet, fridge and comfortable beds. Only drawback was the fact that windows couldn't be opened and A/C was pretty noisy.
It's been a long day, getting up at 4:20 am and having been up for about 26+ hours. It's the first long trip since Peter's cancer surgery and rehab and we are glad to be back to Colorado after almost seven years. Looking forward to the rest of our trip!
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