Red Rocks and a day in Denver

Some red rocks. 

Red Rocks Rocks. 

The view from Dressing Room 7!

Just behind the amphitheater

Taken behind the gift shop

I took a lot of photos at Red Rocks. This is my favorite. 

Last week Judi (the other HelpX-er who was working at Rona's place with me) announced she was taking a day off (it's ok to do that, I discovered!) traveling to Denver for the day and asked if I'd like to come along. Uh, yes.

At my suggestion, we decided that instead of planning our day of exploration, we would  instead just follow our energy and see what happened. From the moment we got in the car we asked for inner guidance on whether to take a right or a left at the first crossroads, and we went from there. 

The first place we got to was Red Rocks Amphitheatre. It is AMAZING. It is an outdoors concert venue located in a natural amphitheatre created millennia ago by water eroding rocks to what they are today. (The seats are a bit more recent.) 

Fun fact: After Pollstar magazine awarded Red Rocks the honor of best small outdoor venue in the US for the 11th time, the leading concert industry magazine decided to just name the nationally coveted honor the 'Red Rocks Award'—and remove Red Rocks from the running. (Check out the Red Rocks Wikipedia article for more cool facts on this place and to see the bit I paraphrased for that sentence.)

Some awesome people who have played at Red Rocks include: 
The Beatles, Jethro Tull, U2, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Rush, Steely Dan, The National, TooL… man, I could go on all day but I'm getting hungry for lunch. So… anyway, with this in mind when visiting it was imperative I have a little dance on the stage. So I did. I also watched people (crazy people) run up and down all those steps and then do push ups and sit ups … eek! After only a few minutes of dancing at that altitude I was breathless. I have no idea how people do boot camp at that height… but I want to be one of those people one day. I also want to be one of the people that actually, properly perform at Red Rocks one day. Or at least have my choreography shown there. 

Anyway, I didn't realize at the time but Judi took a video of my improv… mercifully stopping before I started the wheezing ;-)

Here is something else fun to reward those of you who have read this far and acquiesced to my rampant photo-narcissm: Judi and I walked up some steps stage right and found a door at Red Rocks that said 'Dressing Room 7' and we pushed it and it opened! And we went in to Dressing Room 7 and for a minute pretended we were famous. Here is proof of this cheeky act:

It wasn't very glam.

After Red Rocks, we went into Denver and rode the free shuttle bus that runs through the shopping area. We hopped off when we felt like it, and walked down to the Performing Arts Centre, which I had wanted to see. We met a guy who had a school bus which runs entirely on vegetable oil. He drives it around and gives talks inside the bus to anyone who is interested in running a diesel engine on veggies. After dancing at Red Rocks, hearing about clean gas, and wandering the Performing Arts Centre (where there was a TEDx convention for teenagers on - very cute) we were both a bit famished so hopped into a place on Curtis Street called Sams no. 3 (which is apparently famous) - and I ordered chill cheese fries which our server told me was a good choice - ''it's what we were on TV for!" Take that Stefan, I am now the number one orderer in the world. 

Downtown Denver reminded me a bit of TriBeCa and SoHo in New York. Very hip. After Denver we went up to Boulder but I'm going to do Boulder in another post as this one is acting up - it's not letting me put captions on the rest of the photos.