The other place for strolling and shopping and people watching is the “Old Port” area. It’s the oldest part of the city – short and narrow streets, architecture in the Second Empire style… The place is loaded with souvenir shops and boutiques and assorted food shops. With all the French signage, you can almost imagine yourself to strolling around some arrondissement during “La Belle Epoque”.

Except, naturally, when you get to the actual shoreline with its repurposed docks and the one single train track (which may or may not still be active) separating the “main drag” from the riverside park.

There are a few items of interest to check out in this part of town; I visited two of them this time.

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It’s been a pretty stressful summer at work for me so far. It came to pass that I needed to get away from everything for a few days – and staying at home for a long weekend wasn’t going to cut it. I was going stir crazy, and just had to get out and go somewhere.

But where? Where was far enough to make traveling there a worthwhile break, but close enough so I could do it in a few days?

Why not drive up to Montreal? I’d been there before (a couple of years ago), so I knew what it took. A seven hour drive (with rest stops and the border crossing), so it could be done in one day, and you don’t need much in the way of special preparations….

Since I was just there for two days and three nights, I’m not going to have that much to say about the place. But I did hit a few museums, and get in a pair of walking tours.

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I think I’m going to make it a habit now that whenever I visit a large enough city, and I have some time to kill during my stay, to sign up for a specialty walking tour or two. They’re good ways to learn a little about the history and culture of an area while getting a feel for the place.

And maybe sample some local food and drink.

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Thanks to my friend, I didn’t have to book any special tours to visit the sights in the area around Denver. There are more than a few places to visit that are within an easy day trip away.

One thing that was made clear to me as we headed west was that we’d be going nowhere near the actual Rocky Mountains – just the foothills, as it were. You could easily tell which mountains were part of the Rockies – they had snow on them. No snow; not the Rockies.

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Of course, there’s plenty to see and do in Denver aside from baseball. And football. And hockey. And basketball. Denver’s home to a team in each of the “Big 4” professional sports leagues – And happily enough for sports fans, all four (well, three actually – the Avalanche and Nuggets both play in the Pepsi Center) home fields are all within easy reach of downtown.

Within that roughly two-mile radius are all of Denver’s major cultural and recreational centers.

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Denver International Airport is an interesting place.

Not for any of the facilities or amenities or stuff like that. Rather, it seems that during construction, there were so many delays and problems and cost overruns that people started looking at the project with a gimlet eye. And as they squinted to see the details, they distorted the appearance of other things. Suddenly, all those underground tunnels took on a sinister appearance. The public art and murals decorating the place contained secret symbolism. And the layout of the runways? Don’t get me started (because if I told you, I’d have to kill you).

Yeah, the place became a hive of conspiracy theories.

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I finally went and did it. A friend of mine moved out to Denver over a decade ago, and I’d been saying many times I was going to head out there for a visit.

Well, a nice window opened up in the calendar – early May, right around when there aren’t any holiday weekends where the office is closed anyway, but not when it’s still Winter. And, with me being a baseball fan, the Rockies were at home.

So I booked a flight and a room at a decent downtown hotel, and off I went.

And since I always get a couple of blog posts out of my vacations, you’re going to get to read all about it. Well, almost all about it.

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As always with a vacation, there’s a bunch of miscellaneous items of interest that can’t really be collected into a specific “theme”. The places are widely scattered geographically, they’re small enough so that detailed posts aren’t called for, etc. Then there are all the general observations about the city and local customs.

This final post on Amsterdam will cover all of that, since you’re probably as tired of reading about it as I am of writing it.

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One of the nicer areas in Amsterdam is the neighborhood known as “De Wallen”, as it is the area around the Voorburgwal and Achterburgwal canals, roughly between the Oude Kerk (“Old Church”, which dates back to the 1200s) and Nieuwmarket Square. It’s a surprisingly pleasant residential area, with trees along the canals, little alleys and side streets, and a bunch of bars and night spots all less than a kilometer away from the Central Station and about two minutes from the Damrak.

“De Wallen” is what you call it when you don’t want to say you’re going to the Red Light District…..

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