Destination America!: Friends and Golden Arches

Keeping our northerly route we headed to a town to the west of Denver called Golden, CO. We LOVED Golden!

I think it was a combination of reasons.........campsite had an awesome location right on the river and main bike path in town, awesome parks, cute downtown, tons of outdoor activities, sunny cool days, people outside enjoying, tennis courts nearby, and I could go on. We had a great week and have put it on our short list of favorites.

First day was Memorial Day and on our day off we scheduled a massage, in Denver, with my friend from childhood, Toni. AWESOME!! It was great to catch up and have a massage at the same time. So relaxing.

We all went out to lunch afterwards.

Heading to Trader Joe's, we checked out Larimer Square and the 16th Street Mall, both mentioned as places to visit in Denver. Pretty nice areas.

The girls posing in Larimer Square

We spent a second day in Denver and took care of my much needed haircut, hung out at Washington Park in the south part of the city, and had dinner with friend's Rich and Deshay. Great to see them and see their part of town.

Washington Park in south Denver

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Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre is a great outdoor space with hiking trails and is known for it's awesome acoustics. Tons of concerts are held there and it wasn't until I was hiking around with the girls and saw them setting up for that night's show that I remembered that I saw Tom Petty there back in 1999 during my internship. I was getting into a neck of the woods where some memories were coming back.

We were getting close to sundown, but I wanted to squeeze in one last stop that day and we went up to Dinosaur Ridge. The girls were exhausted from other hikes, but I made them go up and see the first set of dinosaur tracks and read the plaques set up along the trail. So cool to see their actual prints in what was once the shoreline and bottom of the shallow sea that once covered Colorado. We sat with the dinosaur foot prints and had a snack :)

We spent a lot of our time riding the bike path through Golden, playing tennis one day, playing at the park, and visiting downtown.

Nepalese food in Golden.

Luna and her frozen yogurt

Lookout Mountain is the mountain over Golden with the big "M" lit up on the side. I think the "M" stands for College of Miners, but I'm not 100% on that.
At the top is a nature center and some trails. We spent some time exploring and stopped on our way out at Buffalo Bill's grave. He had to read up on Buffalo Bill, because although I know his name when the girls asked what he was known for, I said "I have no idea" :)