Five whole years after my last entry in this particular travel blog and eight years after moving away from Colorado, I am including one final entry.  It seems fitting since the reason for my trip to the Denver area was to retrieve my belongings from storage, most of which had been there since 2003 when I decided to become a nomad for a while.  Although I moved back to Denver for five years (9/2008 to 11/2013), I lived in a friend’s house at first for a few months and then only rented a small studio. Somehow, everything in my life still felt temporary until my recent house purchase.  I was even in Montana for more than two years before I decided to make the plunge into real estate and for the new construction I chose to be ready for move in.  I was back in Colorado in 2017 as part of a longer trip, the blog for which includes those entries. Somehow, this seems the right place for this one rather than my 2021 Montana region blog.

I can’t say I was in a great rush to gather up my belongings from storage in Denver, having waited more than four months since my house move in. The real reason for that, though, is I had scheduled trips in August, September, and October. November was the first block of time without significant commitments.  But I prepared by reserving a U-Haul truck about two months ahead of time and arranging for moving services to help me on both sides.

The flight from Bozeman to Denver lasts barely more than an hour.  This was my first time at Denver International Airport in five years.  The big changed are a huge new hotel in front of the concourse, above a large transportation plaza. That’s where you catch the train, service started in 2017, to Union Station in Denver.  With mass transit other than busses to the airport, Denver is clearly trying to get into the big league of cities.  There’s been a huge amount of new construction around the station, northeast of it in what is called RINO (that stands for River North, not Republican In Name Only).

Along with size, though, comes big city problems.  I am sad to say that Denver seems to be going the way of West Coast cities like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco, with severe social decay. During the Floydian summer of 2020, the city saw major riots and looting, downtown was boarded up for Election Day should a Trump reelection spark more violence and destruction, and the city’s homeless problem keeps getting worse.  In the early 2010s I used to joke about the homeless hoarder who lived in an underpass along the Cherry Creek trail I used to pass on my bike.  Now the problems associated with drug addiction and tent living have gotten so bad, most of Civic Center Park downtown has been cordoned off from the public.  The grassy strips between the sidewalks and streets on Capitol Hill now have plastic dividers to keep homeless from setting up their tents.  Where there are none, I walked past a block long encampment on our way back from breakfast.

I stayed two nights on Capitol Hill in central Denver with my friend Andy, who I have known for almost 30 years.  Andy is a train buff and suggested going to the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden, an attraction to which neither he not I had ever been to before. It was a pleasant excursion and not busy at all on a warm November Saturday.  Railroad history is, of course, an integral part general American history, so it is also an interesting place for someone who doesn’t necessarily consider himself a train aficionado. We followed it with lunch in bustling downtown Golden, a place I don’t ever recall as being so popular, and then a drive up the so-called Lariat Trail to Lookout Mountain.  The place is known for several things, including Buffalo Bill Cody’s gravesite and the best views over the Denver metro area. I have been up several times over the years, but surprisingly for a Denver native, it was Andy’s first time.

On Sunday morning I took the light rail south to Littleton where I had brunch with another friend, Dave, who was generous enough to let me reside with him for a few months back in 2008-09.  He dropped me off afterwards at some other friends, Tim and Toby, who live about two blocks from the U.S. branch bank location in Centennial I worked at for almost three years 1999-2001. That was another dreadful job!

From their house it was only a 2 ½ mile walk to the U-Haul facility where my storage unit of the last 18 ½ years was located.  I arrived on foot within a few minutes of my 9:00 A.M. truck pickup to present my credentials…..and discover that I was in the wrong place.  My truck for pickup was at a different U-Haul facility about seven miles away.  The age of Uber/Lyft makes recovering from such an oversight on my part easy enough.  The truck move out and truck loading went smoothly enough with my two helpers and was completed long before I anticipated.

I can’t say I felt at all nostalgic for Denver proper.  Like many cities, it has experienced an odd mixture of gentrification and social decay the different periods I lived there between 1994 and 2013.  That isn’t as obvious in the outer areas of the metro area, but those areas have had massive growth as well. The whole so-called Front Range has become a massive conglomeration like southern California, the towns almost all having grown into each other.   On my last trips to the area in 2017 and 2019, it was obvious traffic had gotten significantly worse than just a few years before.  That was less clear this time, a mixture of my not driving much except to get my truck on the highway heading north, but also due to so many people still working remotely nearly two years after the plague hit.

I paused my trip north to have brunch with my friend Myra in Thornton in the northern suburbs. “Myra, please meet me somewhere near I-25, so I don’t have to go much off course with my big truck!”  My next stop for the afternoon and overnight was with my friends Don and Ann Marie in Windsor in northern Colorado.  Ann Marie made a wonderful Greek meal of Pastitsio.

Windsor to Bozeman took almost exactly 12 hours for something like 650 miles.  That didn’t seem bad when driving a big truck.  You never know what to expect weatherwise for about nine months of the year in Wyoming. But skies were sunny, and the wind was definitely mild by Wyoming standards.  Upon getting back to Montana, I really felt like I was home again.