We got to start our first full day in Denver with a later start time than we had initially planned when we were going to Rocky Mountain, so that felt relaxing! Our first stop was to the Denver Biscuit Company for breakfast. It's in a really cute building that used to be an airplane factory that has lots of restaurants and stores, so we also went browsing afterwards.
This biscuit cinnamon roll was SO good.
Our next stop was the History Colorado Center! I was pleased to see after the previous day that there was plenty of large parking lots. I don't mind paying for parking but I do like to be able to find parking.
One of the big exhibits is a recreation of a Colorado ghost town when it was in its prime with schools, businesses, and farms.
It should not be a surprise that a "What's that Smell?" exhibit is going to include things like manure.
Miles likes to do pull-ups on everything these days.
I loved this sign and the topographic map of Colorado that they had on the ground floor!
It doesn't matter where I am, I will be drawn to the fiber art.
It turns out that the response of most Colorado farmers during the Dust Bowl is to just keep plowing.
It's a very tall museum, and one of the fun things about that is that you are suddenly above everything very tall from the lower floors.
These Denver icon face-off videos were hilarious, and Molly was excited to see Molly Brown.
The boys were excited to emulate the guy who wore nothing but a bucket to tons of Denver Broncos games.
The ski jump simulator was also a winner!
They had a huge mining exhibit that included a mine shaft simulation and a blasting game.
I loved the Colorado in 100 Artifacts exhibit!
All of the upper level pillars looked like trees, which was fun.
These spinning chairs in the maker space were very, very popular.
Our next adventure was to walk over and tour the Molly Brown house. It's a beautiful house and it was really interesting to learn more about her and her life! The one downside was that the docent at the beginning mentioned that we shouldn't touch anything, not only because it will hurt the artifacts but because they preserve things with harmful chemicals. This meant Elliott was terrified the entire house that just being in the house would kill him and was pretty much scared and crying and ready to be done the entire time.
This was going to be the warmest day of our trip so we headed over to get Little Man Ice Cream! Some of our favorites were the passion fruit, pumpkin chip, Salty O, strawberry, and blue monster.
Little Man is very close to the REI flagship so we headed over to check it out while we still had some time on our parking. Miles has never met a wall he didn't want to climb!
Again, we decided to take advantage of the comparatively warmer weather with our next excursion, a trip to Colorado Journey mini golf. All of the holes are themed around Colorado, some more directly than others.
We also saw a bunch of rabbits on the course!
Any time the hole was really far away, Miles started doing the "ancient technique", which basically boils down to trying to hit directly to the hole, whether that involves the real course or the plants and the sidewalk. This either worked exceptionally well or exceptionally terribly.
We stopped for dinner at Chop Shop, where we had noodle bowls, chicken fingers, chicken sandwiches, and burgers. The food was deliciuos and the portion sizes were very large! (In a bit of foreshadowing, perhaps TOO large for Elliott...)
The soda machines had a local brand of soda and had some of the best restaurant lemonade around.
