Travelogue - Rockies Rail Tour

Jenny had been caught up in the massive weather-related screw-up that hit United Airlines, and made the national news. Her flight out of Hartford was delayed, and she missed her connecting flight out of Chicago. They eventually put her up in a hotel in Chicago, where she managed to get about 4 hours of sleep, before heading back to O'Hare to catch a flight to Denver, that was due to arrive at 8:51 AM. So I checked out of my hotel (We were to spend the next 2 nights with John Rymers, the host of my house concert.), and drove out to the airport, where we finally had a joyful reunion. If it were me, I would have wanted nothing more than to find a bed somewhere and crash. Nope, not Jenny. "Where can we find someplace pretty to walk?"

Denver has a botanical garden. That's always a good bet. So we plugged that into the GPS and drove out there, only to find that all their parking lots were full, as was street parking for blocks around. OK, How about City Park?. So that's where we went.

City Park and Zoo
Click any photo for a full-screen view

46. Martin Luther King Jr. Monument	47. City Park	49. Lake	51. Snowy Egret
46. Martin Luther King Jr. Monument	48. City Park	50. Island	55. Flowers
52. African Penguins	53. Giraffe	54. Flowers	55. Flowers

City Park, at 330 acres, is about 40% the area of Central Park in New York, but that's still pretty darn big. Unlike Central Park, there's free parking in the park. Central Park was built before the advent of the automobile. Emerging from the car, two facts struck me immediately. First, it reinforced what I saw from the plane as we approached Denver: Denver is a Prairie city. It's flat. Look at photos 47 and 48. There ain't nothin' above the horizon except clouds. In Central Park, you know you're in an oasis in the middle of Gotham. The second thing I noticed was that it was freakin' hot! This was the beginning of the record-setting heat wave that hit the American West in 2023. I had not been prepared to go tramping about directly from the airport, and had no water with me. That, plus the 7,000 foot altitude hit me rather quickly, and I soon became pretty fatigued. Yet I soldiered on for an hour and a half or so.

There was quite an extensive memorial to Martin Luther King Junior near to where we parked. The statue shown in Photo 46 was only one element of the memorial. We also passed a bandstand where they were preparing for a concert later on in the day. We wanted to see the Zoo, but we had no map, and didn't know where it was located. We asked a bunch of folks, but they didn't know either. Stumbling around, we came upon a lovely lake (Photo 49) with a rather elegant pavilion with columns and a cafe at one end. An island (Photo 50) served as a bird sanctuary for snowy egrets (Photo 51) and other avian species. When we finally came upon the Zoo, we discovered that we were at the the very back end of it, and needed to walk all around its perimeter to get to the entrance. The fence surrounding the Zoo was mostly opaque, so we were unable to see all the interesting working end of the facility.

It is a fairly extensive zoo, and very modern with animals kept in appropriate environments, not in cages. What's more, there is no admission fee, which was very surprising. I wondered about the penguins waddling around in 98° (Photo 52), but these were African penguins. According to the placard outside their enclosure, "Though chilly Antarctica is home to several penguin species, more than half of all penguin species live in warmer climates like Australia, New Zealand, South America, and Africa." Still, the giraffes (Photo 53...and what improbable-looking creatures they are when actually viewed in person) seemed more at home in the heat, although they too tended to hang out under the tall shade umbrellas provided for them. I was really feeling the heat by the time we got inside the gate, and starting to wilt. I had to sit down in some shade, and Jenny got me some water from a nearby fountain. She was feeling it too. We rested a bit, and set off on the long trek along the periphery of the Zoo, and back to the car. That route went past a number of greenhouses and outdoor flower beds which were very pretty (Photos 53 & 54). It was a big relief to get to the car and crank up the A.C. We grabbed a bite to eat at a nearby deli, and headed down to Littleton, where my house concert was scheduled that evening.

House Concert

56. John Rymers	57. Highland Crossing Common Room	59. Little kid
	58. Me on "stage"

As I had mentioned previously, I had arranged to do this house concert after I had set up this vacation trip. It could not have been a more serendipitous gig. The organizer, John Rhymers could not have been more welcoming and helpful, and the location, the Highline Crossing Co-Housing Community, could not have been a more accommodating setup. Some of you may not be familiar with "co-housing communities". I certainly wasn't until a couple of good friends, Bob Leigh and Mabel Liang invited me to do a house concert in their co-housing community in Cambridge, MA. It's a living arrangement perhaps akin to a commune, and not well known to most Americans. A small number of families, in this case 25, share the property. Each family has private living quarters, comprising of bedroom(s), a living room and bathroom, and perhaps an office or workshop or the like. Some of these are in a townhouse-like structure, and some in detached units. There is also a common room facility available to all inhabitants including kitchen, common dining room, fitness room, library, kids' play room, and perhaps others of which I'm unaware. There is also a guest suite that can be scheduled for visitors like Jenny and me. It is a very close-knit community where everybody knows everyone else. There are a lot of common activities, including a common potluck dinner every week. My house concert was one of those common activities, and so I had a built-in audience in a region where I had few fans on my mailing list. I couldn't have asked for better.

When we arrived, our first order of business after being shown to our quarters was to crash. We were both very fatigued by our hot walk at 7,000 feet of altitude, and Jenny was short on sleep, so we just flopped on the bed and zonked out. After a couple of hours, I awoke refreshed, and feeling human enough to greet my host, John Rymers properly. We were glad to meet each other in person after so much electronic communication. He showed me to the common dining room, which would be the location of the concert. It is a big airy room with windows all around opening onto a patio. I helped him transform it into a concert hall by removing a number of the tables, and setting up a low stage against one wall (Photo 57). I declined the use of a sound system; I'm a strong enough singer to fill a room that size, and inexpertly run PA systems can often cause more problems than they solve. He had a couple of photographers' "umbrella" lights to illuminate the stage (Photos 57 and 58), which proved quite effective. A lot of grunt work went into setting up the room, of which I was most appreciative.

A potluck supper preceded the concert, which gave me a chance to meet a number of the residents. One of them, a fellow named Salvador Amendariz, was carrying a fancy camera, so I took the opportunity to ask him about a problem I was having with mine. I am one of the last of the breed of tourists that caries a real camera instead of using a cell phone. I prefer the view finder to the phone screen, which pretty much disappears in sunlight. I have a Canon Rebel, a low end single lens reflex. Although it's about the most basic SLR camera you can buy, it still requires a 3-credit college course to learn all the bells and whistles, and one of those bells had stopped whistling to me. The LCD display at the back of the camera usually shuts off when I bring the viewfinder up to my eye so that its glare doesn't interfere with my vision. It had stopped doing that. He poked around through all the menus, and found the setting ("LCD Auto-Off") that had somehow gotten disabled. I was ever so grateful. He was the one who took all the above photos.

The concert came off quite well. There were about 40 people, of which maybe 8 or 10 came from my mailing list, including, of course, John Lynch. I was particularly pleased to see Harry Tuft in the audience. He's pretty much the Grand Old Man of the Denver folk community. I got an encore, and felt pretty good about the evening...except for one trouble spot. There was one fellow sitting in the front with a very cute toddler of about 18 months of age. From the moment I started my first song, the toddler toddled back and forth across the space between the stage and the front row, making toddler sounds. It was very distracting, both to the audience and to me. I was having a lot of trouble keeping my mind on what I was playing, and the lyrics, and the audience with whom I was trying to connect. After the first song, I knew this couldn't continue. So I went and spoke with the father, explaining my difficulty, and asking him to keep control of his daughter (Photo 59). He did not take it well, and left the room. It was an uncomfortable moment for everyone, and I felt bad about it. But as an adult, he should be aware that a concert is a concert, whether it be in Carnegie Hall or in a dining room. It's not television. There are real people on the stage and real people in the audience, and they all deserve the respect of an atmosphere free from distractions. I asked John Rhymers to refund the man's admission money. John later reported that the man understood, and declined the offer.