Denver - Days 4-6

So busy I haven't had much of a chance to blog updates.  When I've been in the hotel room, it's been mainly to sleep.  But I have a few minutes here so I thought I'd update the past few days.  

Monday was business as usual, working a few draws and finding times to eat and sleep when it was convenient.  

Tuesday was my day to go do some things around Denver.  I started out by heading down to the U.S. Mint and taking a tour.  After going through a fairly intense security screening just to get in the door, we were taken on a short (about 20 minutes of actual stuff to see) walk through a observation deck where we could see the presses churning out pennies by the thousands (through some hefty glass, so we couldn't get our grubby little hands on them).  It was interesting to see the mint in action, and quite a bit of historical coinage and artifacts were on display, but overall I was unimpressed.  The tour was so constrained, there wasn't a whole lot to see and it just wasn't really worth the trouble, I think.  But I did it, so there.  

After that, I walked back downtown to the 16th Street Mall, which is the main shopping street through the middle of downtown Denver.  It's a pedestrian-only street, with the exception of some extremely convenient shuttle buses that continuously travel up and down the street, so you can just hop on and off as you want to quickly get from one end to the other.  Quite impressive.  

I went to the far end of the street, where I found the Colorado State Capitol building.  As it has become one of my quirky trip traditions to stop at every state capitol I come to, I went inside and wandered around the entire place.  Being a weekday, the house and senate were both in session, and I wandered into the viewing gallery to see a bit of the Colorado legislature in action.  They have a partial museum up in the lower part of the dome of the capitol which I went up to see, though unfortunately you can't climb all the way to the top of the dome, there was a viewing deck at the bottom of the dome.  Pretty interesting.  State Capitols are always fun to visit.  

I did some shopping on the 16th Street Mall and worked my way down to the other end of the city and over to Coors Field.  Not much going on there, but it was good to stop by and see where it was.  Finally made my way back to the car and left downtown.  Upon additional recommendations, I decided to drive all the way up to Fort Collins to check out the New Belgium Brewery.  Just a mile away from it happens to be where one of my sisters works.  I stopped by but she had already left for the day.  In any event, I've been on quite a few brewery tours, but the New Belgium brewery tour was by far the most entertaining I've ever taken.  Just a fantastic place.  

Tonight after I finished officiating at the early draw this morning, I drove back to Loveland, just south of Fort Collins, to meet up with my sister and have dinner with her.  It was good, mainly because if I went to Denver and didn't meet up with her, I'd never live it down.  :)  But we had a good time, and then I came back and here I am.  Now heading back over to catch part of the late draw at the trials before finding some more sleep.  Pictures to be posted later, it's always something.

More to come...