DNC Sunday

Friday afternoon I was on my way to a CNU all committee meeting (or something like that), which was around 3:30pm. The quantity of people on the 16th Street Mall was way up. After the CNU thing, I found myself at a work happy hour at Dixon's on the patio on the corner of 16th and Wazee where we had a good view of the masses going by. Well, let me tell you, that was nothing compared to today! I don't know about yesterday because I was out hiking (more on that in my next post).

We started today by taking the 48 bus to a warehouse at 41st and Brighton. The reason we were there was pretty good. We, and a bunch of other cycling folks from around Denver, were there to ride some of the Freewheelin' bikes to downtown. It was really a symbolic ride more than functional. I mean there are 1,000 bikes and our group took 100 - lead by Mayor Hickenlooper (introduced as the Mayor doing the most for bicycles in the country - I don't think so!! Look at Boston, Chicago, Portland, etc...).

So, after the obligatory remarks and thanks to the coordinators, we rode the 3+ miles to the Denver Sculpture park. It did feel like a momentous occasion and it was actually a lot of fun.

These are some of the bikes:

This is S, Tracy and Andy:


This is my man looking like a million bucks on the Freewheelin' bike:


The terminus of this ride dumped us right in the middle of a big hippie fest in the sculpture park! Just kidding, it was the "Green Frontier Festival" which was, you know, about sustainability and shit. We walked around there and saw an actual wind turbine blade - it was monstrous but we also saw a mini wind turbine - Sandy tried to intimidate it:


There was also some of that non-GMO food propaganda :)

We ran into a soon-to-be-hitched (to one another) couple we know! Kara and Scott - see below:


Our next goal was to check out the happening DNC Sunday. The first sign that something was different were the fire hydrants. The city re-capped ALL the downtown fire hydrants with these new little tops:


I, for one, am a little confused about why these are better but I suspect it has something to do with safety (!). On we went. Around the convention center there were lots of tee shirts and buttons and other Obama paraphernalia on sale, like this tee shirt:

As mentioned regarding Friday, the 16th Street Mall was just a wee festival of DNC. You can see here that the city has decorated nearly every vertical object with Denver2008 banners:


You can check out the Denver Post and other reputable news sources for better pictures of "protests" but there were several going on as we were about town. All were peace protests (i.e. make love not war kind of a message):




These were but some of the police around to keep the crowds at bay:


We also took in the other sights. Like the Union Pacific trains on display. Sandy wanted to show his safety skills:

We also did a ride by on the Pepsi center where we found the press queued up down the street to get in. We also found random other groups about, like the "Rednecks for Obama" - we saw them all over Denver today - I think they have a "get in the most pictures" goal. We gave 'em a hand with that:


After an afternoon of riding around town and observing the DNC humanity we rode the bikes up 18th and noticed a brand new mural:

We then went to our respective places of work for 3 or so hours then headed home.