A day in Denver

Even though the California Zephyr train (train log here) goes from San Francisco to Chicago, we got off in Denver for a night and day before flying back to San Francisco (last Friday). The train arrived 3 hours late so we had dinner on the train and got in well after dark, went straight to our hotel to bed. We were outside enough to feel that it was very nippy compared to San Francisco – about 8 degrees! But we’d been prepared for that as a nighttime temperature.

When we woke up the next morning, I was feeling rather drugged thanks to sleeping very heavily after not really sleeping on the train so I was a bit befuddled when The Mister lying next to me held up his cell phone and said “have you seen those little sparkly things on the weather app before? What is that?” and I screeched “That’s snow!!!!”, leaped out of bed, yanked back the curtains and squealed  “SNOW”! Not much, but it was real snow!

Now then, we didn’t have anything to wear in such weather! I’d checked 3 days earlier before we’d left San Francisco and it was forecast to be 15 or 16 – not 3!!

However, we rugged up in what we had (we did pack scarves and I had gloves) and left the parents-in-law enjoying the hotel buffet while we braved the cold and bus to head 20 minutes out of the downtown area to find decent coffee and a croissant for breakfast. My god it was bitter, although bearable if you could walk in a patch of sun. A guy we shared a table with at breakfast said it was the first sprinkling of snow for the season and was unseasonably early – usually the last day of October was when the first snow fell. So we’d come from a heat wave in San Francisco to a cold wave in Denver!

We spend the middle of the day wandering along the city mall and around Larimar Square braving the cold as much as we could – it was slightly better after an emergency coat purchase stop. The temperature got up to 4.4 degrees – 40 degrees Fahrenheit!

After warming up with a soup and sandwich we headed over the bridge and through the park at the end of the mall to get to more good coffee, hoping it would be a warm cafe we could hang around in for a couple of hours before heading back to the hotel for our bags and transport to the airport – it was, and that’s what we did. On the walk over the bridge we discovered snow still lying about!

To use up some time after coffee before we needed to get to the airport we rode from one end of the mall to the other and half way back on the free mall bus – a great service and I can imagine they’d need it in the winter – it stops frequently on the single mall street so that you can come out of your office building, dash onto the bus, ride a couple of stops and dash back out into a shop or cafe or chemist or train station – barely needing to go outside!

So not a very adventurous day in Denver but despite the cold we walked from one side of our hotel map to the other – the route largely determined by coffee but that’s us!