Portland

Our next destination after Tacoma was Portland, which added the 11th state to our list, Oregon.

We did a lot of hanging out in Portland. We stayed with a friend from OSU, Erik, and his wife, Jenny. It was a blast to stay with them. Thanks guys!

Denver Days

We spent Tuesday walking around downtown Denver and then most of Wednesday doing a little shopping. A few random impressions of Denver:

Downtown is quite nice. Very clean and seemed like there was a lot to do. The rest of Denver is quite sprawling and the city really feels like it is growing quickly.

Denver loves its Starbucks. We counted no fewer than 9 locations along the 12 block 16th St. pedestrian mall downtown, including one corner with two cafes across the street from one another. There are also a ton everywhere else you look.

The REI Denver Flagship store is huge, large enough that we got turned around a few times. They had a little mountain bike testing trail, which is a pretty sweet idea, but it was kind of laughably small. It also had a Starbucks.

We went out to dinner with Glenn to CB & Potts, the restaurant of the Big Horn micro-brewery. They had quite good food and the beer was excellent. Best of all, it was a 5 minute walk from Glenn’s apartment. Can’t get much more local than that. We had a great evening swapping travel stories and planning our Colorado adventure.

We are loving the mountains. We drove up to Red Rocks, the famous amphitheater/park and were pretty impressed. I’ll post some photos next time we have wifi.