Hot Hot Colorado Vacation 2012 Pt. 5: In Which We Visit Blake Street, Home Of The Rockies

Tucson, Arizona, is a pretty big town--more than half a million people call it home (and I'm including our little suburb of Sahuarita in that tally). Denver, Colorado, where I hail from, is a bigger town (600,000+, with over two and a half million in the total metropolitan area). Besides the numbers, though, Denver has always felt like a much bigger city to me...and a big reason for that is their proliferation of professional sports teams.

Denver has pro sports teams in all of the Big Four (football, basketball, baseball, hockey), as well as a pro soccer team, many college teams, and many other club or semi-pro teams. And people are generally nuts over most to all of them. Tucson, in comparison, isn't much of a sports town at all. Sure, there is a dedicated minority who are big fans of the University of Arizona Wildcat teams (mostly men's basketball and football), but the rest? Eh...nobody seems to notice or care. Major League Baseball spring training used to have a presence in town...until low ticket sales meant the teams took their business elsewhere. The minor league teams who are here barely cause a ripple. And...that's about it!

Pro sports followings here in Tucson are almost always imported...people who move to Arizona generally bring their fandoms with them (lots of Packers/Steelers/Bears fans in the retirement communities, for example). Nobody seems to care about the Cardinals or the Diamondbacks or the Suns (or heaven forbid, the Coyotes...pro hockey is a poor fit in our part of the country) since those teams are way up there in Phoenix, you know?

So it's refreshing to take a trip back to Colorado once in a while, where pro sports fans are plentiful, and sports teams have a strong following! Even though I haven't lived full-time in Colorado for years, I still keep an eye on their sports teams every season, cheering them on from afar. I am a huge Broncos fan, for example, but while I was growing up, I was able to see lots of Denver Nuggets games, too. I also caught a single, glorious Avalanche games. Some of my more enjoyable spectator experiences, however, were at several Colorado Rockies games, played in beautiful Coors Field downtown on Blake Street.

Nathan and I thought it would be fun to take the girls downtown and have a tour of the Colorado Rockies' home ballpark. And to make it even more enjoyable, we thought we'd take the light-rail train all the way downtown from Aurora (the Nine Mile station is only a few miles from my parent's house). We saw the whole day as a fun opportunity to explore the city and get a little walking in as well.

The girls, as we suspected, were very excited to take a ride on the train. They were overjoyed and grinned for ear to ear the whole way downtown--probably to the amusement of the other passengers. If we ever do this again, I wonder if the novelty will wear off? In any case, it was fun to watch them take it all in!

The girls are amazed at the "big blue bear" sculpture, which is peering into the windows of the Denver Convention Center

Once we got downtown, we walked several blocks down the 16th Street Mall, another downtown Denver landmark. Basically, it's a long pedestrian mall with hundreds of shops and restaurants. It also occasionally has some avant garde sculpture or paint spring up from nowhere...

...like these oddly painted steel buffalo.

The girls were a little tired by the time we got to the ballpark, but they had some time to sit and rest before we went inside. It turned out to be a pretty hot day (the story of our vacation this year!), but luckily a large portion of the tour was indoors. Yay for air conditioning!

Here are some of the highlights:

From up in the nosebleeds...still, a beautiful view

The girls were impressed at the size of the park

This Statue of Liberty was a gift from the New York Yankees; they gave a specially painted Lady Liberty to every MLB team!

Nate and Aurora in one of the corporate suites

A mini-museum dealing with the history of bringing pro baseball to Denver

Rockies-themed Mickey Mouse!

Jerseys of former & current baseball teams in Denver

Aurora and Nathan loving the press box

Kind of hard to see...on the walls inside the press box are several indentations, from stray fly balls that zipped through the windows during games!

The girls inside the visitor's training room

I'm outside the Rockies' home locker room; too bad we weren't allowed in!

The family near home plate (we weren't allowed on the pristine grass; we're standing just on the edge of it)

Nathan in the home team dugout

After bidding Coors Field farewell, we returned to the 16th Street Mall. At this point, we decided to drop by a favorite bookstore of ours: the Tattered Cover Book Store, a multistory, sprawling independent bookstore that's been a Denver staple for years. It's true that you can often buy books cheaper online; however, there's something exciting and magical to Nathan and I about wandering randomly through a bookstore, seeing what surprises might await us on the shelves.

going up the stairs in the Tattered Cover (it's about 4 stories high!)

Lorelai relaxing in the children's reading area

Celeste meeting Babar the elephant, whose wife in the books is also named Celeste! True love!

We let each girl pick out a book for herself; then, we took some time to read, sightsee, browse, and (especially in Aurora's case), rest from all our walking...

Aurora finally succumbed to the heat and exhaustion, and probably won't remember much of the Tattered Cover as a result. Oh well, we'll always have this picture of her to prove that she was there.

After we each selected a book, we got a quick lunch elsewhere along the Mall (a Red Robin-style burger joint), then headed back to the light-rail stop for our journey back to Grandma's house...

Despite the heat of the day, we really had a great time. Maybe next time we're in Colorado, we can take a tour of the Pepsi Center (home of the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche), or even Sports Authority Field at Mile High (aka, Mile High Stadium, where the Denver Broncos play). That would make this pro sports fan one happy lady.