Denver, Colorado

Freaken cold!!!

02.12.2009

1Dec. The train ride to Denver was beautiful. We passed desert, canyons and the Colorado river which was frozen at some points.
Even though we were on a train for 24hours the time went by reasonably quick and the leg room was not bad at all. We went through a 6mile tunnel which took about 10mins to complete, that was quite cool. As we got closer and closer to Denver it was obvious that the temperature was rapidly dropping as the snow quantity increased from station to station. The train went right past the chair lifts of a few ski fields. We arrived in Denver at around 7pm and when we got off the train it was frrrreezzing! We got our luggage, called a hostel and took the free bus to the end of 16th street. 16th street is about a mile long and it is the main shopping street. The free buses run from 6am to 1am up and down this street picking up and dropping people, free of charge at every corner along the street. The whole street is decorated with Christmas lights and all the side streets have some decor too. It totally felt like we were entering the holiday season as we traveled along 16th street. We got off at the end of 16th street and walked for ages to get to our hostel. At one point we thought we were lost so we went inside a 7/11 and asked if we could borrow a map. The only map they had available was a huge extremely detailed map, so Dan opened the map on the floor of 7/11 and laid there trying to find our spot. We weren't lost after all we just had about 10more blocks to walk :-(

We arrived at the hostel to find that we were the only people there. Later that night Rich from Chicago came and talked to us and said he has been the only one staying there since Saturday. So its pretty quite over here. We went to bed and snugged up inside our goose feathered sleeping bags from MacPac New Zealand. They saved us, without them we would have frozen stiff.

2Dec. We woke up this morning to find a white landscape - yip it snowed during the night and everything was covered in about 5cm of snow. It was totally awesome dude! We walked to downtown were it started snowing very lightly again and eventually snowed quite heavily, I absolutely loved it. My long nose would catch a snowflake every now and then which was funny. We had oats with brown sugar, pecan nuts, currant and raspberries for breakfast from Jamba Juice and then went for a hot drink at Peet's. Dan had a large (please see picture attached to understand the American definition of large) hot chocolate and I had a gingerbread latte. It was really nice.

I bought some snow boots from Ross. Ross is a really really cool shop which sells really good brands for very cheap. My boots are waterproof and made for extreme cold conditions. Just what I needed. I am sure this is just the beginning of their journey in the snow. I will keep you up to date on how they find the extreme cold cities which are yet to come. It is so cold over here that even the statues have icicles hanging from their noses :-) For some reason there is steam coming out of the ground at some places, we think it must be something to do with the heating systems of the hotels. It is quite a treat walking through it as it is one way to get a little bit of warmth quickly. For dinner we had sushi (only a little bit as we didn't realise it would be such small pieces) then we went to Taco Bell for Nachos. It was a huge bowl for $3 and it was nice and warm. The temperature when we walked home was 11oF (or -11.6oC). It is really beautiful over here and the snow totally works with the layout of the town.