Sunday June 17th: Golden CO area

Sunday morning we had to take some time to clean up the apartment, return the keys and get the car repacked with the addition of Ben's luggage.  Once we got going we drove to Golden.  We parked and walked around town for a little while and picked up some brochures from their information center so we could pick some things we might want to do in the area.  The first thing that caught Alex's eye was Dinosaur Ridge.  We went there first and it was a good thing because the day was heating up fast.

It's a self guided walk along a closed road with a pretty good incline...no shade.  Both kids were troopers, we brought along a backpack with water and stopped as we needed to to rest.

These footprints were amazing.  Really cool.

From the crest of the road we could see Red Rocks Amphitheater in the distance.  Beautiful!

Prehistoric crocodile footprint.

By the time we were done at Dinosaur Ridge it was very hot.  Alex said it felt like it must be 100 degrees.  Turns out he was close, it was a record high that day and was 98.  We needed to find a break from the heat so we went back into Golden and decided to have a picnic and then go on the Coors Brewery tour.  No we were not the only people taking our kids on the brewery tour, there were tons of other people there with the whole family.

Alex was really into it, I think he listened to my audio device (it's a self guided audio tour, you get a little device on a lanyard to listen to as you walk) more than I did.  They go into great detail about the ingredients and science of the brewing process.  

These are the faces of children who never get soda being given free huge cups of whatever soda they wanted.  And allowed refills.

This is the face of a man getting 3 free full size beer "samples" at the end of the tour.

My face is the face of the gluten intolerant person who doesn't like soda trying to pretend I'm having as much fun as everyone else in the sampling lounge at the end of the brewery tour.

After the tour we decided given the fact it was late afternoon and so hot that our best course of action would be to go check in to our motel and go swimming for the evening and find a good dinner somewhere.  So we did.