Sparacino family summer vacation Day 4 downtown Denver, Colorado

After two days at Rocky Mountain National park and this view out of our hotel room balcony, it was time to move the road trip on down to Denver, Colorado.

Although I'm terrified of major traffic, it does not stop my love for traveling and seeing new places and this traffic was major.

 Coors field, home of the Colorado Rockies

Our hotel was right downtown and when we arrived, our room was not ready so we decided to walk around and check stuff out.

 Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception- beautiful!

 The Colorado state capitol is really beautiful and gives free tours so we stopped in to take one.

 Our kids are at a great age. They have their bearings and know where we are when we travel, and they are super into learning about everything. They soaked up all the info they could from the tour.

Denver is the "mile high city." It is 5,280 feet above sea level making it one mile above sea level.

 We didn't visit, but the Denver Art Museum was very cool from the outside! It stretched farther down the road with other adjoining buildings- a very large museum!

We had hoped to tour the U.S. Mint after the capitol tour, but after LOTS of walking and whining, we learned that you had to have a reservation. We were a disappointed bunch AND we had to walk all the way back to our hotel. I will say that with the humidity in Colorado being around 20%, it is not bad walking around with the temperature in the 80's. Back home in Arkansas, we would have been sweating buckets!

I'm pretty sure swimming in the pool erased their disappointment :-) That water was cold!

 We took the hotel shuttle down to the 16th Street Mall for dinner and to walk around exploring. We ate at Maggiano's Little Italy and it was great!

 There are lots of stores and businesses on this 1 mile long open mall.

 We attempted a family selfie and then a nice lady offered to take our picture. I am going to offer to do this for people more often because it was so nice to have our picture taken without stress!

Downtown Denver was pretty neat!