Colorado Days 5 & 6 (THE FINAL CHAPTER!)

This is the final chapter of our Colorado trip!

Read about Days 1 & 2 here.
Read about Day 3 here.
Read about Day 4 here.

Today was all about Paul! We were taking a tour of Mile High Stadium! Paul is a huge football fan. I could care less about football. I think it is dumb. There, I said it. (Things I don't think are dumb: Big Brother, Nancy Grace, and Dr. Phil.... So you can determine whether I should be the judge of what is dumb and what isn't!)

We left our friends in Colorado Springs and made the drive back up to Denver. We went right to the stadium. Before I show you lots of pictures, let me tell you that I really enjoyed the stadium tour. We had an awesome guide and he gave us a lot of inside information on the facility. The tour had little to do with FOOTBALL, and a lot to do with the inner workings of the stadium. I don't know if all stadium tours are like this, or if this one was just super awesome.

Paul being silly.

Paul's first selfie. It was a good try.

Hot and cold baths in the visiting team's locker room.
Paul kept saying, "Tom Brady SAT in those!"

The official's locker room not only had braille on the sign (haha get it the refs can't see?)
but it was right across from one of the 6 huge beer refrigerators that hold all the beer for the entire stadium (haha get it the refs are all drunk?)

Visitor's locker room.
Our tour guide pointed out that the carpet kind of made you dizzy when you looked at it (hard to tell from the picture). That is so the visiting team feels sort of off balance when they are in there. Let's not win because we're better at football. Let's win because of the carpet.

I don't know why he took a pic of the visting team's urinals!?

This is the sign right outside the visiting team's locker room. Our guide said it is one last reminder to the visitors that they are going to have a hard time out there on the field.

Paul running out of the visitor's tunnel. A boy can dream!

Paul touching the field. We weren't allowed to walk on it but we were allowed to touch.

That night, we went to dinner at Hacienda, a Mexican restaurant. I got to try my first ever FISH TACO. Fish tacos always sounded disgusting to me, but these had mahi mahi in them, which changed the game for me a bit. I have no pictures because I was too hungry and devoured all three before I could even think of it!

This may be a good time to mention how polite everyone is in Colorado. Whether I was at a restaurant, gas station, hotel... anywhere... people were just so nice. Sometimes I go to grocery stores in PA and the cashier doesn't even look at me, let alone say hello to me. In Colorado, it always went something like this:

Cashier: Good morning, how are you today?

Me: Great, how are you?

Cashier: I am good, thank you so much for asking.

See, isn't that lovely?

Because it was July 3rd, Denver had quite a few fireworks shows at various places in the city. Lucky for us, we could see one perfectly from on top of the parking garage across from our hotel! Happy Birthday, America!

I'll admit that even though I was having a blast on vacation, around Day 3, I started to miss my home and I started to miss my cats. We had an awesome cat sitter staying at our place, but I still worry about them and miss them when I'm gone. By Day 6, I was excited to go home!

I don't fly a lot at all, which means I am not used to flight delay/cancellation issues, so I was extremely annoyed when I got a call at 3:30 am the night before our flight telling us it "may" be delayed due to "crew rest issues". I immediately started stressing. We had a connecting flight in Philly that I did not want to miss.

Note: I feel bad even complaining about the airport experience on the day we went home, as Kristina's clearly tops mine! However, I will still tell you about it. Then go read hers and see what a big baby I am being!

Our first flight ended up departing about an hour late. The pilot came on the intercom and told us we would only be arriving about 20 minutes later than our original arrival time. We would be making up a lot of time in the air. (I don't know how they do that but AWESOME for us!) So I calculated the time in my head, and if we did indeed touch down when the pilot claimed we would, we had about 20 minutes to catch our connecting flight. I think I clenched my butt cheeks the whole flight!

Luckily we were sitting right at the front of the coach section, so it only took us about 3 minutes to get off the plane. Unfortunately, our next gate was so far away we had to take a bus to get there. We were seriously running through the airport "Home Alone" style.

Well, we made our connecting flight with zero time to spare. WAHOO!!!!!!

We were home with our kitties before it was even dark out.

Colorado was fun, but I love my home!

How could you not miss this face?

Jelly missed us so much he needed some Emo dry...

(Emo dry is when Jelly eats a lot of dry food because he is feeling very emotional.)

Have you ever done a stadium tour?
Tell me an airport horror story!