Day 30: Denver, CO
Welcome
Yesterday we drove from North Platte, Nebraska, to Denver, Colorado.
At 11.30am we left North Platte, Interstate 80, the country’s second longest highway carrying us towards the Colorado border. As I80 continued west on its way to San Francisco we left it and diverted onto the southwest-running I76 which heads all the way into Denver. We made it an hour before our call time which was lucky as none of us had eaten; the gas station stop halfway through the drive hadn’t been particularly inspiring. An afternoon breakfast was had at the downtown Modern Market Eatery, and I ordered for myself a Curry Salmon bowl with salmon, rice & quinoa, fire roasted veggies, marinated kale, curry sweet potato soup, toasted coconut, and green onion.
The venue was the Mission Ballroom in north Denver, a 4000-capacity room that looked completely unremarkable from the outside, just a collection of brick and corrugated iron boxes stuck together with air conditioners on top. Inside was a different story, an extremely well-designed concert venue with great sight lines from the amphitheater seating at the back of the room, and a state-of-the-art D&B Audiotechnik PA that has excellent side and rear rejection, meaning that very little of the PA sound spills back onto the stage. It made a big difference for us, having a clean stage sound, and the speakers also sound incredible from the front.
Before soundcheck I took my broken bass amplifier apart to see if there was anything obviously broken. I pulled the metal chassis containing the electronics out of the wooden enclosure and we carefully plugged it in and tested it with the speaker. It worked perfectly. I reassembled it, sliding the metal chassis back in and replacing the screws to get it ready for action. We tested it one more time just in case, and sure enough it was broken again. Soundcheck had begun by this point, so we had to give up and the amp became a nice stage prop for the evening.
Denver has been good to us as a city and the audience last night were committed to continuing this tradition. The front row seemed to know all the words and were more than happy to sing along for the entire 45 minutes of our set. Afterwards when we met a few people at the merch table I was met with an onslaught of breakfast recommendations, all of which are unfortunately very far away from our hotel but still greatly appreciated.
At this point in the blog, I know that nearly every reader is expecting me write about how we checked in to a Holiday Inn Express, looked at a funny piece of hotel art, and then fell heavily to sleep. They couldn’t be more wrong. This time we were staying in the ‘full-service hotel’ the Holiday Inn, Denver East. For the next two nights we could kiss our limited amenity lifestyles goodbye and enjoy features like same-day dry-cleaning, on-site ATM/Cash machine, and 24-hour business centre. There is an enormous atrium that looks a bit like an 80s sci-fi prison, and we enjoyed waving at each other across this vast indoor space.
This week on art corner we look at a photo located in the Holiday Inn Express’s atrium, a space that was nicely decorated with large indoor plants, lamps, and photographs of urban infrastructure. This particular shot is of the Lowry Avenue Bridge in northeast Minneapolis, shot by Joe Christensen and available for purchase on istockphoto.com.
