Decided to leave the big city behind and head towards Boulder early today.  Denver is a very cool city and I'm sure we could do many more great things if we stayed longer, but we were longing for the mountains and decided to head out.  We did make two stops on our way up to Boulder.  First, we went to Red Rocks - they have an amphitheater and some amazing views.  Tons of huge stars have played this location, but when we were there it simply was a tourist area.  The non-tourists, by and large, were there to use the steps for exercise. You'll see runners in some of the pictures.   This place is incredible.  Check out the pictures.

We then headed towards our hotel in Boulder, but along the way we ended up passing right through Golden. Frankly, when I saw the sign I said something like "I think there's a brewery in Golden...as I think there's   marketing for some sort of beer being made in Golden, Colorado". As you probably realize, it's Coors. So,we figured given that we literally were driving right through the home town that we'd have to take the tour. All I can say about it is that the people at Coors need to visit Busch in St. Louis to learn how it's done. We waited in line for more than an hour and half, some of which in 90 degree sun, to then load on a bus which took us on a rather lame city tour.  Then, we finally got to go on a self-guided walking tour.  The tour itself was fine and they did offer 3 nice size tastings at the end.  But unless you really like Coors products, the tasting leaves you wanting tastier products.  We did get Blue Moon (which I do heartily enjoy), along with something called Batch10 and Coors Banquet.  Also tried something so good that we cannot remember it's name.  Overall this event took us around 3 hours and it wasn't too great.  If we had gone out of our way to get to this tour, we'd have been super frustrated.  They have no idea how to move a volume of people in the summer through their facilities and they just said it was super busy in summer.  No duh.  AB seems to have no issue pushing through 10X volume and we didn't wait more than 15 minutes for that tour.  Nonetheless, it was free.

We arrived in Boulder around 3.  What a really nice town.  Went to the heart of the place - Pearl Street and got some food at Wok Eat.  Checked our a bunch of specialty stores and just took in the scenery.  Ended up then also going to the 29th Street Mall to do some browsing.  Tomorrow begins the mostly outdoor portion of our trip, so this was one last foray into major civilization.  Boulder seems like a great town.