Christkindlmarkt

Posted on November 26, 2017 by Roger

For the past eight or ten years, we’ve gone to downtown Chicago to see, among other things, the Christkindlmarkt in Daley Plaza. We didn’t make it down last year before we moved, so when we learned that Denver had one, we decided to go.

We got downtown late on a Sunday afternoon. I knew I had to find a parking garage, and that it would cost me between $14 and $20 for a couple hours. We circled the area a few times, then followed some cars into a likely-looking garage. The woman by the door asked if we were visiting someone who lived in the building. It turns out I’d pulled into the lot for a high-rise apartment complex. When I found out, I asked if we were supposed to be there. She said they rented to the public when spaces were available and that they were a lot cheaper. We pulled into our assigned spot and headed upstairs through the ritzy lobby and past the security guard. This was the outside of the building. The market was directly across the street.

We walked from one end of the market to the other in about five minutes, even with taking our time. It was about a 10th the size of Chicago’s.

It still wasn’t dark, so we wandered around the area. It was about 65° out, and we saw many people in shorts. We were in our shirt sleeves and carrying our jackets. Among other interesting sights, we saw a woman sitting at a small table. She had spread out several stuffed animals in front of her and she was engaging them in lively conversation. When we walked back past her a few minutes later, she was beating them with a stick.

We headed up the 16th Street Mall, which I had been led to believe was filled with interesting stores. It wasn’t. It was filled with shoe stores and boring stuff like that.

It was close to dark when we got back to the market.

We walked through slowly again, and my wife decided to buy a clay toy shop that has smoke come out of the chimney when you put a candle inside.

While she was doing that, I took photos of the sunset, or what I could see of it.

We headed back to our garage, past the security guard. Another woman was at the door. She took our ticket and charged us $3 for an hour and 45 minutes. If we go back, we’re going to remember that apartment building.

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The Brass Armadillo

Posted on November 26, 2017 by Roger

We wanted to see the Christmas lights in Denver, which meant we had some time to kill. I found a large antique mall called The Brass Armadillo west of downtown, and it successfully occupied much of our afternoon.

It was your typical antique mall — a lot of junk, some fun stuff, a few good pieces here and there.

They had a snack bar decorated with Pepsi stuff. The woman in green on the far right who is glaring at me works there. She saw me carrying a sign and called me over to tell me she could bring it up front for me and give me a number to hold to pick it up when I was ready to pay. I told her that wasn’t necessary. Three more times over the next hour she came up to me and made the identical offer. The last two times I was with my wife. On both of those occasions, she told us that she used to have a booth at the mall and that she bought most of her stuff from this one dealer back in the corner. She then proceeded to tell us about some item she bought for one price and sold for a much higher. We saw no indication that she remembered either of us from any of our past conversations.

I found a Pepsi blackboard for $25. My instincts tell me it’s original, not a reproduction. I thought that was a good price and figured, even if it turned out to be a reproduction, I only paid $25. I found two more almost identical elsewhere in the mall. One had the same logo with a blue border. The other had a newer logo with a yellow border. Both of them were priced around $140. (The magnets didn’t come with it.)

My wife wanted to find a picture for a particular place in our house. I wanted her to buy this, but she didn’t like it. I know she’s secretly kicking herself for not getting it.

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The Butterfly Pavilion

Posted on November 26, 2017 by Roger

This small building in the Denver suburb of Westminster is a zoo of invertebrates.

There are three exhibit rooms inside with cases and tanks filled with octopuses, crabs, spiders, ants, bees, etc. A woman was sitting in the first room with a tarantula she called Rosie. Anyone who wanted could hold it. When I saw that I’d get a sticker for my bravery, I went for it. With its weight distributed on eight legs, it hardly felt like anything. The lady had a hard time coaxing it off my hand. Apparently it liked me more than it liked her.

The main feature was an atrium filled with tropical plants and butterflies.

We walked around the room twice and sat on a bench for a while. Some of the butterflies were stunning, but most of them were either up near the ceiling or grouped on clusters of flowers that were high above our heads. We stayed maybe an hour and a half. I’d go back if I was in the area with a couple hours to kill.

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The Colorado Model Railroad Museum

Posted on November 25, 2017 by Roger

We visited Greeley for much the same reason we visited Fort Collins — just to say we’d been there. But unlike Fort Collins, which at least had a few attractions, Greeley was pretty dull. We walked up and down main street and found absolutely nothing of interest. We ate lunch at a Rudy’s BBQ, which won’t be in business long. It was the lunch hour on a Saturday when a lot of people were out and about, but there were only about eight people in the place. The Texas Roadhouse next door was packed.

My main goal was to visit The Colorado Model Railroad Museum. It fills a metal building along the tracks and was surprisingly popular.

The model railroad winds around on several peninsulas. Other railroad-themed displays line the walls and a second-floor balcony. Many of the visitors were engaged in a scavenger hunt among the display, looking for dinosaurs and gorillas and such, but we weren’t given the list of items to find.

This being Colorado, part of the scene depicted a forest fire. You could push a button to light up the orange lights and make smoke.

There were maybe four trains running, one of them with a Christmas theme. It didn’t seem like a lot of action for the size of the display.

The track wound around behind a wall to an area done up to look like a port, complete with a model of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

We walked through the caboose, but there was a young couple in there getting their photo taken, so we didn’t stay long. And that was pretty much it for Greeley. We ate supper at Chick-fil-A, then went to see Coco at a theater in the mall near our hotel. We didn’t know anything about the movie except that it was put out by Pixar Animation. It seems like Disney has completed its takeover of the studio. The animation was amazing, but the story was totally Disney — a Hispanic lad travels to the land of the dead on Dia de los Muertos and fights to get an ancestor remembered before he disappears forever. It was a hunk of seriously twisted theology disguised as a harmless children’s movie.

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Lory State Park

Posted on November 25, 2017 by Roger

We were in Fort Collins and we wanted to hike. Our afternoon plans were in Greeley, which was about 30 miles southeast, so it didn’t make sense to go too far west. We headed to Lory, the nearest state park. There weren’t a lot of people when we arrived, but it was filling up fast when we left. It’s my opinion that the park exists primarily to give the people of Fort Collins somewhere close by to go to.

I mean, it was pretty, but there are thousands of prettier places in the state. It might have been more impressive if we had taken the uphill trail to the top of a large rock formation. But the trail we took led over a couple of rises to the shore of the Horsetooth Reservoir, a large and rather unimpressive man-made body of water.

I carried my binoculars and spotted four birds on our two-mile hike. Not four species — four individual birds — two magpies, a flicker, and a Common Loon that was drifting out in the lake. There were a few gulls too far out to identify, and gulls don’t count anyway.

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