With the two-night Decadence event over with, and the calendar rolled over to 2023, I had one full day left in Denver. This day would be dedicated mostly to Meow Wolf, more urban exploration and beer tasting, with the following day being mostly taken up by the long drive home.

Sunday, January 1, 2023

On the first day of 2023, with Decadence now over with, my only planned stop during the day was Meow Wolf. Beyond that, I only had a list of bars, restaurants, and other attractions I made for myself after looking through WikiTravel and Atlas Obscura.

I got my breakfast from the 7-Eleven next to the Super 8 hotel, and then did that long walk to Central Park station to catch the A-line to Union Station. At the station I got a great peppermint bark latte from Pigtrain Coffee.

Somewhere in Union Station I found this old photo. I'm not sure when it was taken, but clearly sometime around the year 1900. Back then, this is what you would see immediately after stepping out of Union Station, looking down 17th Street. Both of those buildings are still there! But the "Welcome" arch is long gone.

I started consulting Apple Maps on my phone to find some of the places I'd put on my list. Unfortunately, they were all out of business. The Colfax Museum, Leela Café, and Denver Diner were all closed permanently. So I just went to a light rail stop downtown and caught the E train.

This is what Denver's light rail trains look like; up to this point, the only train I'd ridden had been the A line, which was a longer, wider commuter train.

I rode the E to the 10th & Osage station. There's another place there I found out about on Atlas Obscura, a restaurant called the Buckhorn Exchange. This place was closed too, but not permanently, just at that time, and I never made it back.

A few blocks east I found Santa Fe Drive, which was something of a main drag for this particular neighborhood. There wasn't much activity at that time, between 11 and 12 on a Sunday morning, but a few places were open. The one where I stopped was Renegade Brewing. I got an ale called Buffalo Brown, which was pretty good. I liked the atmosphere here, but most of their beers were IPAs so I didn't stay for another one.

After some more walking around, I found my way to Broadway. This is a long, north-south thoroughfare that's a few miles south of downtown, lined by so many great restaurants, bars, and breweries, and is worth spending a lot of time at. Baere Brewing was open at that time, where I got a Belgian Strong, and I thought that tasted just like a good real Belgian beer.

Now it was time for lunch, and I wanted to eat at another place I found on WikiTravel, called Racine's. And guess what, that place was closed permanently, too! WikiTravel's entry on Denver at that time was really outdated.

Bus 0 regularly goes up and down Broadway. I got on the northbound 0 and rode it directly to Union Station, where I knew I could find something good to eat. At Union Station I found a seafood restaurant called Stoic & Genuine. The food was good; I got a warm quinoa salad with tuna, made with celery, cucumber, cabbage, and avocado. But it was rather overpriced so I'd hesitate to recommend it.

And now, on to Meow Wolf! It was easily reachable by light rail; I just rode the E train from Union Station to the Empower Field at Mile High Station, then had to walk across some parking lots and under a highway overpass to get to Meow Wolf.

Meow Wolf is an immersive art experience, which makes you feel like you've entered another, very surreal, world. As of now, in 2023, you can find one in four cities: Denver, Santa Fe which I visited previously, Las Vegas, and Grapevine, Texas which is between Dallas and Fort Worth. The one in Denver is subtitled "Convergence Station" and its theme is that it's supposed to be a bustling hub of interdimensional travel between worlds. As with Santa Fe, there was a whole backstory full of world-building, but it required a lot of stopping and reading text at certain points. Next time I visit a Meow Wolf, I'm going to stop and read that stuff more.

The first "world" I made my way to looked like downtown in a city at night. This was the perfect example of Meow Wolf's surrealism...

This really feels like something out of a dream. I mean, it looks mostly like something from the real world, but in many ways, not. Everywhere you look you see unreadable text.

Moving elsewhere...

There's a whole room full of stuff like this, made out of old phones, video and audio cassettes, and NES controllers.

Here's something you can spend too much time at. What you see here is projected on a high ceiling. It's controlled through this really arcane control panel, where you can sit and push buttons.

Yeah, good luck figuring this out. I think it's supposed to be some kind of alien technology. All you can really do is randomly stab buttons and watch the projection on the ceiling change.

You can scan all those QR codes and they take you to some really random websites, like this and this and this.

This is from the "Mijo Miho Cyber Café" which is part of the city downtown area. There's more messages to read here. What's with all that binary text? While going through these photos after getting home, noticing the numbers were eight digits long except for the last one, I converted all those number into hexadecimal and correctly guessed they were codes for Unicode characters. It spells out "I found it!"

I really liked Convergence Station, even a little better than House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe. I think I should have stayed longer and read more about the backstory behind the Quantum Department of Transportation. It was only from Wikipedia that I found out that the city downtown that I really liked was supposed to be in an enormous megalopolis that covers an entire planet. I'll have to come back during some future trip to Denver.

After Meow Wolf, I wanted to find my way back to Broadway to find something for dinner, since that street seemed to have plenty of good options. I took the E train south to the Alameda station, which is a short walk across some parking lots from Broadway.

For dinner I stopped at a place called Illegal Pete's. This is a local chain which serves burritos and bowls, kind of like Chipotle, but much better. And, also unlike Chipotle, they have a bar with a decent beer selection; I had a New Belgium Mountain Time Lager and an Avery White Rascal Belgian Wheat.

One last stop of the night. Since I try to stop at an Irish pub in every city I visit, I walked into Irish Rover. But to drink, I had to start with something not Irish but local, Breckenridge Funslinger Lager which was pretty good. I also ordered an Irish Coffee after that, something I usually ask for in these places to see if they make them right; while they did use the right kind of glass mug, they still did put Bailey's in it which is not something you'll get if you order one across the pond.

And finally at Irish Rover, I found a beer on the menu I didn't expect to find: Genesee Cream Ale. This is not a craft beer, but something I call a legacy beer, one that has been around for over a century but isn't Bud, Miller, or Coors. Some better-known examples are Pabst and Yuengling. I'd heard of Genessee before, but didn't think I could ever find it outside of New York state. But here it improbably was, in Denver. I thought it was great. Not quite as good as Grain Belt or Narragansett, which I think are the best of the legacy beers, but it's up there.

Sunday night was the only night of this trip in which I actually returned to my hotel the way I'd planned to every other night. After riding bus 0 back to Union Station, I took the A train to Central Park and walked back to the hotel from there.

Monday, January 2, 2023

The trip was pretty much over by this point. I had breakfast at the hotel and checked out. But there was one other thing I wanted to do in Denver before leaving: grocery shopping at a Whole Foods. When you live in an isolated town of just over 30,000 people, hundreds of miles away from any such store, you'll want to take any opportunity for stocking up. There are several in Denver, and the one I went to was just off of Interstate 25 in the Washington Park neighborhood.

There were a couple things I found at Whole Foods that I have to mention: one was wild rice. That is, rice that's completely black. They sell this stuff in bulk and I bought so much that nearly a year later I still have quite a bit left. Cooked by itself it tastes OK, but I've found I like it better when it's mixed up with an equal amount of brown rice.

The other thing I found was cascatelli. This is the newest pasta shape, and there's even a whole podcast made by its creators about their quest to make the newest pasta. The only kind they had at this store was not the standard wheat pasta, but made from chickpeas. When I cooked this for the first time days later, I found this gave it a savory taste you don't usually get from regular pasta.

Before finally taking off in the direction of home, I looked a little bit at the neighborhood where the store lay, and it really looked like the kind of place I'd like to live. Reasonably-sized houses, close to the street without much of a lawn, and within walking distance of Whole Foods.

There's still a bit more to write about, because getting home was made more difficult by the weather. As I drove further south through Colorado, the weather got progressively more windy, snowy, and icy, and I knew this would be a problem because I would have to drive higher and higher into the mountains to drive through the Raton Pass, which lies right on the Colorado-New Mexico state line. As I drove higher into the mountains, the roads hadn't been cleared yet and traffic was backed up as everyone wanted to move slowly. But then as I reached the highest point, the clouds, snow, and ice miraculously cleared up! Apparently the Raton Pass was higher than the cloud cover that day.

The treacherous weather wasn't over, though. After getting out of the mountains, while driving on the flat plains in New Mexico, I was getting hit with wind so strong I seriously feared that it might send my car flying off the road. But I made it home safely and would be spending another weekend in Denver only two weeks later.

Before I go I have to leave this video here, about Denver's transit system, made by someone who noticed a lot of the same issues I did. He even mentions the parking lot-surrounded Central Park station.