Whitesides Weekend

Even before we moved to Denver, we were excited to know that Ty's book tour would bring him through on a visit. Even better was the news that because of UEA, Connie would be able to join him. Then an extra bonus, Brittney was also on break and she and Melody came to visit too. It was so good to see friends and family!

I got to spend Thursday with the girls while John was in school and Ty had yet arrived. It was so nice to spend some girl time together.

Melody go the visitor sticker for our visit to watch Ty's school presentation. It's a very fun presentation with a great message for the kids. I texted Tyler during the presentation letting him know I was watching his video in Colorado. It's so fun to see friends doing so well and having so much fun doing it.

John joined us at after school for the book signing.

Brittney spent Saturday with family and we took Ty and Connie for quite the unintended adventure. It started with a DU homecoming brunch that ended up being at the campus's Jewish Center. We thought it was an alumni/tailgating thing...oh well. After the campus tour we headed downtown. Our first stop was the Denver library. Ty found and offered to sign his book while Connie and I started a checkers match. After Connie had beat me, we were asked to leave the children's area since they didn't typically let adults come in and hang out. And thus we were kicked out of the children's section of the library.

Along with all the "Occupying" going on across the nation, Denver too has its bunch of protesters hanging out in front of the Denver capital. We steered clear of the protesters and made our way through the state troopers to the Mile High step of the capitol building. A couple blocks away is the US Mint (closed on Saturdays) and we decided to swing by and take a look at the building. Walking behind the mint though, we ran into a group of 30ish SWAT members that we think were just setting up for the march the Occupiers would later be going on...more on that below.

To get away from the craziness that was around the Civic center, we decided to head to the Denver Performing Arts Complex and walk the pedestrian 16th street mall.

John and I had driven by this statue that has now been deemed the "Lance and Evan" statue...so we needed pictures of it for them.

At the Colorado convention center is this enormous Blue Bear sculpture titled "I see what you mean". John gave it some love...

Standing under the bear.

We headed to the 16th street mall only to find, no joking, thousands of Zombies. Apparently it was part of Denver's annual Zombie crawl and was just perfect ending to a most random day. Even more entertaining to me was to later find that the Occupy protest had begun its march down the 16th street mall only to encounter the zombie party. I wish I would have been at that meeting...

We got to spend that evening with Ty and Connie and spent Sunday at church and the McMurtreys seeing Melody and Brittney one more time before they all caught their flights. It was one crazy weekend...I'm glad we had other people to witness it with us.