Denver Pavilions parking, like all parking in Downtown Denver takes place either on the street at a parking meter, or in a parking garage. Denver parking meters, as always, run $1 per hour, with a two-hour maximum until 10:00 P.M. Monday through Saturday. Meters are free all day on Sunday and holidays.
The Pavilions parking garage is accesses off of Welton Street. You need to be headed northbound on Glenarm to get in easily, so get on 15th Street (one-way westbound) from Tremont Pl., Court Pl., or Colfax and turn right (north) onto Welton St.
Elevators from the Pavilion’s garage go directly up into the Pavilions Mall. However, there are two different elevators, so make sure you pay attention to which one you come out of.
From the ground level, you can hop on the 16th Street Mall Free Shuttle and be anywhere in downtown Denver in minutes.
Parking Garage Rates Pavilions
Pavilions parking rates are $4.00 per hour for the first three hours, and $14.00 for anything over 3 hours during the day. However, after 5:00 P.M. weekdays, and all day on weekend, its a flat rate of $7.00, so if you’ll be less than 2 hours, try and find a parking meter. Meters on the nearby cross streets are typically full during the day and when there are events downtown. However, you may have better luck parking on 15th Street.
Patrons of the United Artists Movie Theater in the Denver Pavilions can park for free in the parking garage with validation. Take your parking ticket with you to the movie theater. In the lobby validate your parking ticket with the automated validation machine on the wall next to the door across from the concession stand. Keep in mind, that validation is for three hours only and the clock starts when you enter the parking garage, not when your movie starts. That means that dinner and a movie isn’t going to work unless you really finesse it and see a short flick.
During the Christmas holiday shopping season, the Pavilions parking garage usually has special rates to help lure shoppers to the downtown mall. For the holidays in 2009 through Christmas, parking rate specials are just $2.00 on weekends and evenings after 5 p.m. if you have your ticket validated with a Pavilions merchant, restaurant, nightclub, bar, or the movie theatre.
Many merchants do not require a purchase for validation, so don’t forget to ask, even if you are just window shopping.
The Denver Art Museum is located in the heart of Downtown Denver next to the downtown branch of the Denver Public Library and just a block from the Denver City and County Building, the Colorado State Capital, and Civic Center Park. The museum is occasionally referred to in print as DAM, though never in spoken conversation. It houses several permanent art collections as well as touring or temporary exhibits.
Denver’s art museum has a large collection of Western art, as well as African art, Pacific or Oceanic art, and a respectable modern art collection as well. While the museum cannot compare to the large museums in New York or California, it does have much to offer those interested in art. For those looking for "brand name" or "bit hit" paintings from well known artists such as Monet, Picasso, and Rembrandt, there are a few, but not huge collections, and virtually none that you would recognize from the poster shop in the local mall.
The museum’s contemporary art collection is both worthy and fun. It is bit more accessible than other modern art collections around the country and provides plenty of eye candy as well as the requisite number of "is that really art" pieces.
Denver Art Museum Hours and Prices
The art museum is closed on Mondays, which confuses plenty of visitors.
It is open during the rest of the week at 10:00 am except for Sundays when it opens at noon. The art museum closes at 5:00 pm everyday except Friday when the southern Hamilton Building is open until 10:00 pm. (the North Building still closes at 5:00 pm.)
Denver Art Museum admission costs $10 for Colorado Residents and $13 for everyone else.
Kids under 5 are free and children from 6 to 18 are $3 for residents, $5 for everyone else.
Parking is available in the parking garage next to the museum just to the East. However, getting into the garage is not intuitive. The entrance to the parking garage is on the southern side off of the street a block south of the road that actually goes to the museum and under the bridge that separates them. The rate is comparable to the parking meters if you stay longer than an hour, but remember that Denver parking meters are free on Sundays.
Denver Art Museum Restaurant
There is good news and bad news when it comes to eating at the DAM.
The good news is that Palettes is a wonderful fine dining restaurant inside and has plenty of great food including a Portobello Mushroom Sandwich that eats like a steak sandwich. It’s part of the Kevin Taylor Restaurant Group, and in the summer at noontime, you might need a reservation, or you’ll end up waiting a half hour or so.
The bad news is that there is no cafe style eatery with sandwiches or a quick bite to eat on the go. That means there is no place for the kids to get a sandwich or juice box and sit for a rest.
Back outside an across the plaza is a Mad Greens eatery. They have sandwiches, but as the name implies, this isn’t a cheap quick bite place with a ham and cheese waiting for your kiddos. They have soups, salads and paninis as their main offerings. Think Panera Bread if it were focused on the salads with the sandwiches as the secondary offering instead of vice versa and you have a pretty good idea.
There are a couple of coffee stands inside the museum. They serve Nolo Coffee which is very good, so your latte fix is ready and waiting.
Denver Art Museum Buildings
The Denver Art Museum is comprised to two buildings linked together via a second story bridge over the street below. The original building was designed by Italian architect Gio Ponti and resembles a stone castle. The new building is the gray triangles one. The much cooler multicolored building you may notice is the central branch of the Denver Public Library.
The newer building is an angular set of gray triangles that sounds much better in its description than it actually looks like. Designed by Daniel Libeskind the and known as the Hamilton Building, the southern museum building screams, "Look at me! I am fresh and original and designed by a world renowned architect!" As with anything that begs for attention, not all of what it receives is good. The building would undoubtedly be widely regarded as folly if not for having a famous architect’s name attached to it, which may be why the museum reminds everyone who designed it at every chance.
What Was Described 
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What It Really Looks Like 
Ironically, the design and the resulting interior actually suggests that the building was designed by an inexperienced amateur. The supposedly light refracting gray panels that cover the museum’s exterior do nothing of the sort. The museum could have saved a lot of money by just using plain gray panels. Inside, the angular walls required the installation of raised floor panels, painted to match the walls, in order to keep visitors from banging their heads on walls that start five feet away at floor level but protrude into even a shorter visitor’s headspace thanks to their extreme angle. For a building that is supposed to have you looking at the works of art instead of watching your head, it seems an amateurish choice.
Even more bizarre is that the museum is forced to continuously improvise new ways to display their artworks since simply hanging a frame on a 45 degree angle wall provides neither a suitable way to hang heavy artworks, nor a usable way to view them.
Rocky Mountain National Park, RMNP is the crown jewel of Colorado’s great outdoors. Covering some 415 square miles, the park lies north and west of the Denver area. Of course, the park envelopes part of the Rocky Mountains mountain range that runs from Canada down across virtually the entire width of the United States, finally petering out somewhere in New Mexico.
Within Rocky Mountain National Park are 17 peaks higher than 13,000. The highest mountain in RMNP is Long’s Peak, with a peak elevation of 14,255, making it one of Colorado’s famed "14ers," mountains with a top elevation above 14,000 feet. But, there is more to Rocky Mountain National Park than just high mountain tops.
Much of the park’s land has an elevation of just 7,500 to 9,000 feet. While, still most defiantly mountainous, the terrain and scenery at this elevation can be beautiful and lush. In addition, it is packed with all manner of animals including, elk, bears, wildcats, several species of deer, moose, beavers, and the official state animal of Colorado, bighorn sheep. Recently, Canadian Lynx were also reintroduced to the park, as part of a national effort to repopulate the Lynx’s former habitat within the United States.
Trail Ridge Road
One of the favorite ways to enjoy Colorado’s largest national park is by taking a scenic drive over Fall River Pass on Trail Ridge Road. In addition to consistently being named one of America’s most scenic drives, Trail Ridge Road holds the distinction of being the highest paved road in the U.S.
There are numerous places along the road to pull off and take in the beautiful mountain scenery. Watch for signs designating scenic viewpoints. The twisty nature of the mountain road can make it hard to see these areas until drivers are right on top of them, so the signage warning, is the best way to ensure that you don’t miss anything, while not having to jam on your breaks and crank the steering wheel to avoid missing it.
Near the summit of Trail Ridge is the Alpine Visitor Center on Fall River Pass. The visitor center itself sits at 11,796 feet. The large wooden sign outside makes a favorite tourist photograph and a great keepsake souvenir of any traveler’s visit to the Rocky Mountains.
The full drive is 48 miles long and takes around 3 hours for those used to driving in the mountains, and a bit longer for "flatlanders" or those from areas without any hills or mountains. Trail Ridge Road is only open during the summer months. During the winter, snowfall and wind make it impossible to keep the road open. Highway crews try to get the road open by Memorial Day each year. It usually closes sometime in October when the snow drifts start to overmatch the plows.
Trail Ridge begins as branch off of Fall River Road which passes through the Fall River Entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. It is also designated as U.S. Highway 34. It winds its way up the mountains until Milner Pass which sits astride the Continental Divide. From there, it runs back down to the Southwest side of the park and the Grand Lake Entrance.
Estes Park
To get to the road from Denver, visitors head for Estes Park. Estes Park is a small mountain town whose primary purpose is to be the town next to the national park entrance. For the most part, it is composed of a main street and two or three blocks extended outward on either side. However, there are some great little pockets of charm, beauty, and fun to be explored. These include the Stanley Hotel, made famous by the movie The Shining — the good one with Jack Nicholson. The exterior shots of the sinister Overlook Hotel are of the Stanley Hotel, though the interior of the hotel was not used for the movie which was shot on a Hollywood movie set.
The quickest way to Estes Park is to take I-25 northbound to U.S. 36 (a.k.a. Boulder Turnpike). Travel on U.S. 36 through Boulder and Erie. The highway then winds its way all the way up to Estes Park.
Numerous signs in Estes Park point the way to Rocky Mountain National Park and the nearby Fall River Entrance.
The Denver Zoo is one of Denver’s top attractions for kids and adults. With fun for everyone from infants and toddlers, to big kids and adults, the zoo has something for everyone.
Denver Zoo Animals
Popular zoo animals include polar bears, monkeys, elephants, giraffes, seals, lions, snakes, and more. The Denver Zoo has several special animal exhibit areas. One of the most sought out zoo areas by young boys is the Tropical Discovery zone which is filled with tropical fish, brightly colored frogs, alligators, komodo dragons, and of course snake and spiders. Needless to say, this area is very popular around Halloween, during the zoo’s special trick or treat event Boo at the Zoo.
Another special habitat area is Bird World, where the Denver Zoo keeps its brightly colored tropical birds like parrots and toucans, as well as more exotic birds like the hornbills. A hard to spot, but worth the look animal is the sloth, which occupies one of the tropical bird rooms and can usually be spotting sleeping – of course — among the ceiling rafters.
Of course, no visit to the zoo would be complete without seeing elephants. The Denver Zoo is home to two Asian elephants. Daily demonstrations show both how zoo keepers interact with the elephants and offer a fun show that lets kids see some of the amazing things elephants can do, especially what they can do with that long trunk. Hippos and the zoo’s rhinoceros, along with the unusual Tapir are all housed in the same complex as the elephants.
The zoo is set to break ground on a new and improved elephant exhibit in 2010.
One whole corner of the zoo is dedicated to primates, that’s monkeys to most of us. But, the zoo doesn’t have just one or two kinds of monkeys, it has dozens of species ranging from a family of several gorillas, to chimpanzees, orangutans, and several smaller and less known monkeys as well. The primates live in indoor / outdoor environments that allow visitors to see them either climbing trees outside, or lounging around behind the glass inside.
Another popular attraction are the zoo’s lions which are housed in a new savannah style environment that mimics the animal’s natural habitat. Guests can see lions lounging in the sun on a rock outcropping, or pacing among the long grasses. An indoor viewing area offers up close and personal views of the lions just inches away through floor to ceiling glass windows.
Denver Zoo Special Events
The zoo offers several special events through out the year. Special events in 2009 include Boo at the Zoo, Zoo Lights, Brew at the Zoo and of course, the Denver Zoo free days.
Zoo Amenities – Food Strollers
Scattered throughout the zoo are concession stands offering the usual fare of hotdogs, hamburgers, and French fries. But, the zoo goes one step further, also offering up fresh salads, both chef salads and southwest chicken salads, and other healthier treats for conscientious parents. But, don’t forget to splurge on cotton candy, or a snow cone for that all around fun zoo visit.
If you don’t want to pack up your stroller or are just hoping that maybe it won’t be necessary, don’t worry. The zoo offers affordable rentals of both sturdy plastic strollers (in traditional and Jeep shapes) as well as wagons big enough for two kids and a day’s supply of food and drinks. Rentals are $5 for wagons, and similar amounts for strollers.
Denver Zoo Deals
For a great Denver Zoo deal, buy a large drink when you first arrive. Refills are just 87 cents (75 cents plus tax) all day. In fact, the zoo souvenir cups are refillable year round for the same price, so if you are making more than one trip to the zoo this year, keep your cup.
Parking
Although the zoo is close to downtown Denver, parking is provided with both large surface lots and an underground parking garage. On all but the busiest summer days or when there are special events, parking is no problem. For crowded events like Boo at the Zoo or Denver Zoo Lights, you may have to park at the Nature and Science Museum, or even walk in from one of the surrounding neighborhoods.
If you do park in on neighborhood streets, watch the signs. Some areas require a resident permit and others only permit 2 hour parking. Also, from April to November, be sure to read the street sweeping signs (the red ones with lots of words). These signs will inform you that there is no parking on one side of the street on a certain day each month. If you see everyone parked on the other side of the street, chances are, that day is today.
