Visiting downtown Denver and the Denver Mint

Denver, Colorado, has been our home for over ten years.  But we didn't take advantage of all the wonderful attractions available, instead just took them for granted.  So this summer, I decided that we would act like tourists and go to as many different places as possible.

An obvious choice is downtown Denver.  With all the museums and shops, how can we go wrong?

Brown Palace. Beautiful.

One of the places we visited was the Museum of Contemporary Art.  The kids enjoyed some of the art pieces and we tried to really look at it and understand what the artist was trying to say.   Everyone agreed that it was interesting, but nobody really liked it.


http://www.mcadenver.org/

 A South American artist put this multimedia sculpture together, with wires strung up in one room going through the wall, then attached to the the televisions and such on the other side.  We thought it might have represented the overabundance of technology in our life...

 This plastic silicone stuff looked like drips of paint mixed with trash.  Maybe making a statement on the environment and trash?  Anyway, it was the coolest thing there.

The bubble garden was supposed to be a fun place for the kids to play, but that lasted about five minutes...

We rode the 16th Street mall ride.  A convenient way to travel and you meet very different kinds of people, but we don't like being crammed in with strangers on a smelly bus..




Bill made reservations for the Denver Mint in June and the soonest we could get a tour was September 5th.  Which happened to be Jessica's 13th birthday...  She wasn't too thrilled about being there, but took it like a good sport.

If you get the chance to visit the Mint, it is a marvelous experience.  So much history and security.  We couldn't bring any bags in, except for a pocket-sized wallet, and had to shut our phones off.  Then walked through a metal detector.  Through the tour, we had at least two escorts, plus the tour guide.  Everything is behind glass and you can see the coins being made on the ground floor.   There were some great pieces of old machinery and some funny stories.