My Adventure to Denver (Day 1)

        The solo trip I took to Denver was a very last minute decision. Beginning Thanksgiving day- December 12th, I got approved to take a two week break before starting at a new job. (I'll make another post on that later. Why I switched to working at a different school etc.) I knew I would probably be approved for the two-week break, but nothing was finalized until November 23rd..

    I began looking up flight prices for multiple different cities. I was kind of hoping to travel somewhere coastal. Dana Point (I'd loved traveling to California both the times I had before, and had heard this was a beautiful place), Lake Tahoe (a lake I had saw a picture shared of online. The water is super blue and clear and the area looked mesmerizing), Jacksonville (I had yet to visit Florida), Texas (I hadn't visited Texas yet and heard it was nice). I had also considered driving out to Nashville, as multiple friends of mine had really liked the city. Unfortunately a lot of these flights had layovers, and weren't the cheapest. Not only was flying to Lake Tahoe not cheap, it was also cold there in December, and if I was going to travel it had to be at least a little warmer than Wisconsin in December. 😋Since a lot of flights had layovers in Denver, you could get tickets to Denver pretty cheap, and having had flown into the Denver airport twice before I knew it was a good choice. The Rocky Mountains are more beautiful than the Smokey Mountains, I will fight you on this. Despite being in the mountains the weather forecast for Denver was warmer than Wisconsin's too. (It is quite a bit more south than WI too.) 

    I'm actually surprised with how last minute everything was booked, that it went as well as it did. With no big problems, which always seem to occur when I'm traveling. My AirBNB was perfect in location, and aesthetic. The activities I chose to do, and booked ahead of time were all great, etc. I watched quite a few videos on things to do in Denver, and near Denver before my trip. 

   My flight was set to leave at 8:35ish in the morning, meaning I had to get to the airport earlier than I would have liked to in the morning. I made it to the airport in plenty of time, and felt pretty accomplished. The flight ended up getting delayed for boarding about 15 minutes. I noticed that traveling alone, gives you the opportunity to talk to more people potentially, or people you wouldn't have, had you gone with someone. For instance while waiting for the plane to arrive an older guy made a joke about how he liked my black paper mask. Said guy was also wearing a black paper mask. He asked me where I got it, and we started talking. It turned out he was a Psychology professor at MSOE, I told him how I had been a psychology major, which started a conversation on psychology which went mostly way over my head in what he was saying but it felt cool to have had that conversation anyway. The airplane I ended up on was a smaller plane even though I was flying through United with about 20 rows of two seats on each side. We would end being let out on the runway instead of into the airport through the connecting portals, but our flight also was a little late getting to Denver.  

  I flew out of Wisconsin at the perfect time, as it started snowing after my plane took off and the temperature dropped. It was in the 50's when I landed in Colorado at around 11am Colorado time. I then made my way to the baggage claim, which at the Denver airport requires riding an underground subway to the different terminals and baggage claim. I wasn't expecting to get on, and get off right away at the next stop, so I ended up riding the subway too long and had to get off, and get on another one. By the time I made it to baggage claim, my bag was with one of the airport staff. I grabbed it and then took a shuttle to the car rental place. There was a line to rent cars, so it took a bit, but finally I was given my car for the week. A black Nissan Ultima, that you could drive 500 miles before having to fill up the gas tank. (I drove a little over 400 miles in my five days in Colorado.) I thought that when I had gotten my rental car, I'd explore downtown, but I was exhausted after getting little sleep the night before etc. I stopped for lunch at a restaurant down the street from my AirBNB called Chop Shop. The Chop Shop has a lot of interesting food combinations. I ended up ordering the shrimp fried rice with bacon, edamame, an over easy egg, snow peas, etc. It overall tasted good, although I think it would have been better without the bacon pieces, which added a weird flavor. The rest of the night I spent resting at the AirBNB, and making a quick stop to Safeway to buy a few things.