Denver is a city I'd wanted to visit for quite a long time, and had even been thinking about moving to even though I'd never seen it. It's in such a perfect location, right next to the Rocky Mountains and some of my favorite places to go snowboarding, and also is the home of a great many craft breweries. For New Year's Eve 2022 I found out about an event which looked like a great reason to plan a trip to Denver.
As 2022 was drawing to a close, I was seeing ads on Facebook for two big New Year's Eve events. Both were called Decadence, were two-night indoor electronic music fests, with one being in Denver and the other Phoenix. I gave them both some thought and eventually decided on Denver.
I'd briefly visited Denver once before, back in 2018, while on the way to Silverthorne for snowboarding. On that trip I flew from San Antonio to Denver, rode the commuter train from the airport to Union Station, and with some spare time before my Bustang bus to Silverthorne left, stopped at the Wynkoop Brewing Company across the street from Union Station for a frothy glass of milk stout. From that brief glimpse, it looked like a nice city and I knew I'd have to come back someday.
Friday, December 30, 2022
It was a long drive to Denver from Clovis, New Mexico, something like ten hours. It didn't help that I ran into frustrating, endless traffic jams on Interstate 25. I found an alternate route, exiting the highway, driving west on 7th Avenue all the way over to Quebec Street, which I took north. First I had to stop at a strip mall where I had dinner at a Panera, and from there straight to my hotel, Super 8 by Wyndham Denver Stapleton, which is at the intersection of Quebec and 36th.
After checking into the hotel, now I needed to get downtown as soon as possible so I could get into Decadence. Now, I thought this hotel was close to the Central Park commuter rail station. It looked close on the map! But it was actually a 20-minute walk, most of which was past enormous parking lots. And because it was Denver in winter, some of the sidewalks were covered with ice in certain places. When I finally made it, I found that I'd have to wait another 23 minutes until the next train bound for Union Station. This was taking a lot longer than I expected.
Here's one of Denver's A-Line commuter trains at Central Park station. This one was heading to the airport, while I was waiting for one going the other way to Union Station downtown. You know, even though the city's transit system does have its problems, it could still be a lot worse. Their commuter trains--the A-line and the N-line--look and feel quite similar to those in the northeast, like on the Long Island Railroad.
At last the train I was waiting for showed up, and brought me to Union Station in much less time than I had spent waiting for it. Now, how to get to Decadence? I was still in an unfamiliar city with only Apple Maps and not much experience with the transit system. I found that RTD, the city's transit authority, runs a free shuttle bus called MallRide from Union Station through a stretch of 16th Street called the Mall. I rode this bus to 16th & Stout, from where it was only a short walk to the Colorado Convention Center.
Getting in and scanning my ticket didn't take long at all. Then there was a walk around some long hallways to check my coat in, where I handed over my heavy leather jacket. Finally, into the musical experience I came here for...
Decadence had two stages, each in a different convention hall: Mainframe and Motherboard. There was also a silent disco called Hyperdrive, which I'm sure was a great time but I didn't get around to going there. On Friday night Mainframe was all the same kind of artists that play festivals like Bass Canyon while Motherboard was more mainstream house and techno artists like Tiësto and Chris Lake.
When I first stepped in, I was in the hall with the Motherboard stage, and I walked to one of the bars to get a beer. But this bar was so crowded, and it looked like the others weren't much better, that I spent all of 45 minutes waiting in line! For that whole time I listened to most of Jai Wolf, who was on the stage then. Near the end of his set he played some songs that were a bit of a preview of Saturday night's lineup, like Porter Robinson's "Something Comforting" and San Holo's "Lift Me From The Ground," before wrapping it up with his own "Indian Summer."
It was while "Indian Summer" was playing that I got my long-awaited beer. The selection was pretty narrow, and this being Colorado there was an abundance of Coors and Coors Light. I'm pretty sure it was the Light I got that time.
I could've stayed at Motherboard for Big Wild, Tiësto, and Chris Lake, but since I'd had such a good time at Bass Canyon, I decided to keep going down that path and headed over to Mainframe where Trivecta's set was half done. This stage was definitely the place for bass heads that night. After Trivecta were three top producers in that world: LSDream, CloZee, and finally GRiZ.
I stayed at that stage for all of LSDream and CloZee, for the first time enjoying a full set from both. It also helped that the bars here weren't nearly as crowded as at the other stage. Finally GRiZ came on, saying "it's great to be home!" (He lives in Denver) This was a great set too, but I only stayed for about half of this since I didn't want to get stuck in a huge crowd when leaving, and I'd already seen GRiZ six months earlier at Electric Forest.
It was here that I had to deal with the frustrating limits of the transit system. I couldn't see any light rail trains running, so I walked back to Union Station. By then it was something like 2:00 in the morning, maybe later, and it looked like I missed the last A-line train to Central Park. And so I had to turn to Uber. It was a 15 minute wait for the Uber to show up, and I had to pay $52 for it. Ugh...and it wasn't going to get any better the next night.
Saturday, December 31, 2022
New Year's Eve was going to be devoted to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in the afternoon, followed by the last night of Decadence as the year rolled over.
My hotel only had the "continental" breakfast so I had a waffle and some apples, and then got some cashews from a nearby 7-Eleven to complete it. I didn't get any coffee at the hotel or at 7-Eleven, though, since I wanted to get something better downtown. After breakfast I did the 20-minute walk past all the strip malls and Wal-Mart to the inconveniently-placed, questionably-named Central Park station to catch the A-line train bound for Union Station.
Inside Union Station. This has to be one of my favorite train stations in the USA, even if it doesn't serve a whole lot of intercity trains (for now). There are so many great restaurants, bars, and coffee shops here to keep me coming back here even when I wasn't in need of a train or bus.
I got a coffee from one of the stands in the station's atrium, and then headed out to explore downtown Denver for the first time.
Union Station from the outside. The lettering by the clock lights up at night, and there is identical lettering on the other side where all the trains park. Today there's only one Amtrak route that calls here, the daily California Zephyr which runs from Oakland to Chicago, with stops in Reno, Salt Lake City, here, and Omaha, among others. Other than those two daily trains (one eastbound and the other westbound), Union Station is also a hub for the RTD's light rail and commuter rail routes, as well as the statewide Bustang bus system. So even with the scant intercity service, there's still plenty of passenger traffic here, and that along with the shops and restaurants keep this place a bustling center of activity.
Union Station will probably get even busier in the future. Amtrak's expansion plans include a new north-south Front Range route which will run from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Pueblo, Colorado, with stops in Fort Collins, Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, and others in between.
While sipping my first coffee I walked around this area, Larimer Street. It was so early, though, that not much was open.
On 17th Street, between Wynkoop and Wazee, I found a great coffee shop called Amante. I stopped here for an Americano, and it was a nice enough place I stayed and drank it there.
With some time to kill before going to the museum, I wanted to go to a local brewpub and decided on the Denver Beer Company. This place was on Platte Street, on the other side of the South Platte River from downtown, so I had to walk over a bridge.
This narrow stream is the South Platte River.
The Denver Beer Company is a great place for local craft brews. First I had a peanut butter Graham cracker porter, which was good, but not as good as the other beer I had, Denver Gold amber lager.
A glass of delicious Denver Gold
It was now after noon, but I wasn't quite hungry for lunch yet. By now I was ready to get to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, which is on the east end of a huge, bucolic green space, City Park. This wasn't reachable by light rail but I could take a bus there. I had an easier time getting to there than I did getting to the hotel from there later.
The Denver Museum of Nature & Science was like many other museums I'd visited recently, such as the American Museum of Natural History in NYC and the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in DC, only bit smaller.
The area I spent the most time in was all about the Cold War Space Race, and especially, the Apollo moon landings. There are models of '60s-'70s rockets that are worth a close look:
First, look at the big green one on the right. That's a Soviet R-7, which is what propelled their Vostok capsules into orbit, the first of which was flown by the first person in space, Yuri Gagarin. That little stick in the middle with a Mercury capsule on it is an American Redstone, which could launch a Mercury capsule into space but wasn't powerful enough to push one into orbit; the chimpanzees who preceded American human pilots rode these, as did Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom on their Mercury flights. The one on the left is an Atlas, which was powerful enough to get a Mercury into orbit, and it flew the last four Mercury missions, starting with John Glenn.
On the left is a Titan missile topped by a Gemini capsule; those were the two-person capsules which were used for the Gemini missions which tested out space flight techniques to be used on Apollo missions. On the right is another Soviet R-7 used for the series of Voskhod capsules; Alexei Leonov, who was the first person to ever do a spacewalk, flew one of those.
Second from left is a Saturn I, which was never used for any manned flights. Second from right is the slightly larger Saturn IB, which could push an Apollo capsule into orbit but no further, and was used for the first manned Apollo mission, Apollo 7, as well as to deliver the three Skylab crews to their station and for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975. That beast on the left is the Saturn V which sent the other Apollos to the moon. Finally on the right is another evolution of the Soviet R-7, used for the first generation of Soyuz capsules.
The first flight suit ever used for space flights. Yuri Gagarin wore a suit like this flying Vostok 1.
Mock-up of the USA's first satellite, Explorer 1, which launched in 1958, a year after being beaten to the punch by the USSR's Sputnik 1. This satellite confirmed the existence of the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth.
And now we're up to the moon landings...
And some more cool stuff...
The International Space Station
NASA's new Space Launch System, which will send the Orion capsules on their missions whenever NASA is finally able to do that. As of the time I took this picture, and also as of the time I'm writing about it nearly a year later, it's only been launched once, on the uncrewed Artemis 1 flight. It launched on November 16, 2022, the Orion capsule flew around the moon a few times, and then splashed down in the Pacific on December 11. Unlike the Apollo capsules and like the SpaceX Dragons, Orions are reusable.
I also watched a couple of shows in their planetarium, something I'm trying to do more often whenever I visit a city. First was Apollo: When We Went to the Moon followed by Black Holes.
Yeah, I found the museum to be a worthwhile experience. They even had a pretty good food court, where I had a pizza slice, salad, and a fruit cup for lunch in between all the wanderings around space exhibits and the planetarium shows.
There was much more than just the space stuff, such as a hall devoted to ancient Egypt. It's just that the space stuff is all I fit into the time I had.
After the museum, all I had time to do was get back to the hotel and take a shower before heading to the convention center for Decadence. This took a little longer than I would've liked, since when I got on the bus outside the museum, which I wanted to ride to Union Station, I accidentally got on the bus going the wrong direction.
Decadence would be starting up at 6:30, and I wanted to be there before 8:30 which is when Porter Robinson was going on. Fortunately I wasn't behind at all. The only problem I had was finding any coffee; all the cafés at Union Station and downtown were all closed but I was able to get one at a 7-Eleven. I needed the caffeine to keep myself awake through the long night ahead.
I got into the Convention Center and checked my coat with enough time to eat something. There were some food stands in one area, and I had a rice bowl with chicken tinga.
Unlike last night, when I spent most of the time headbanging at the Mainframe stage, this time I'd spend the whole night in the other room at the Motherboard stage. The first set I wanted to experience here was Porter Robinson's DJ set. I'd already been to his Nurture set back at Electric Forest, which had been mostly devoted to his latest album, in which he had the turntables, a synth, and a mic on the stage. Here though, he was just being a DJ spinning tracks. The set included some great bangers from across the last 20 years, like Ian Van Dahl's "Castles in the Sky," ATB's "It's a Fine Day," Nero's "The Thrill," and Daft Punk's "One More Time." Mixed in were some of Porter's own tunes, like "Easy" and the last song of the set, "Language."
After Porter's set, I quickly made my way out of the fast-thickening crowd near the stage, because I don't like being stuck in such a tightly-packed crush of people.
Flume was next on the stage. He's a producer from Australia I've been listening to ever since ACL 2016, when I actually missed his set, but bought his album Skin on CD there. Here at Decadence, he had a singer joining him on stage to provide some live vocals for songs like "Never Be Like You" and "Say It." Flume actually told us her name when he introduced her, but I didn't quite catch it; I'm pretty sure it wasn't Tove Lo, though.
Dillon Francis was next to lighten the mood for the rolling over of the year. When midnight finally hit, balloons dropped from the ceiling.
Happy 2023!
The next artist was San Holo, someone I'd wanted to see for quite a while, whose music is slower, mellow, and dreamy compared to everyone else I'd heard that night. I liked what I heard, but left before it was over thinking I was leaving early enough to easily catch a ride back to the hotel.
Unfortunately catching a ride back to the hotel was anything but easy. The light rail was running on some special holiday schedule which I couldn't find posted anywhere, and at that time it looked like there were no more trains stopping at the convention center. I walked to a nearby bus stop where, along with some fancily-dressed people who had just left a swanky New Year's Eve party, I waited and waited for at least a half hour for a bus that never showed up. The nicely-dressed people eventually just walked off looking for some other way home, and then I walked back to the convention center to desperately try to hail an Uber or Lyft. Both of those were naturally swamped, but I finally did get myself an Uber to take me back to my hotel, and it cost me all of $72. Ugh...
Denver's transit system is better than a lot of other American cities', but it still needs a lot more improvement.
To be continued...
