Colorado vacation- Travel day and Day 1

We just got back from a relaxing vacation in Denver, Colorado.  It was Cooper's first plane ride and he did great!  He did so well on the entire trip.  Okay, so let me start at the beginning....

Back at the end of June, Southwest Airlines had their "Wanna Getaway" sale, that I just happened to discover one day while browsing plane tickets.  I was getting an itch from the travel bug and started looking around.  I texted Eric telling him that I was in the mood for a little vacation.  At that point, we were just getting settled in our house, had just finished two weeks of camp, and still had several things coming up in the summer.  The next day, Eric and I started talking more about taking a trip somewhere...but we would have to purchase the tickets that day (by midnight) to get the great deal we found.  It looked promising too--travel would have to be between the last week of August and before Thanksgiving.  We started looking around 11:00pm at flights to see what cities had the best deals.  To make a long story short, we actually somehow booked flights to Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Oops!  We had several browsers open and I think it confused the Southwest site, since they remember your most recent search.  So even though we had picked the Denver flight with the correct times, when we submitted, it said "Flight Confirmation and details for your trip to Grand Rapids".  After some quick scrambling, we were able to switch our flights within a few minutes, get $4 back, and we were booked for Denver at 11:59pm.

Why Denver?  Why now? Well we picked it for a few reasons....
1. We've both been to Colorado before (I've been around 7-8 times and Eric has even spent an entire summer in Denver) and we LOVE it!  Every time I visit I talk about how much I want to move there.
2. Our plane tickets were $350-- for all of us, roundtrip.  So while we looked at places on the east coast, the cheap skate in me couldn't pass up the deal.  And since Cooper flies free until age 2, we needed to get on this!
3. It was a pretty short flight (1:15-1:30 flight time) and direct.  Since this was Cooper's first flight, we wanted to make it an easy experience.
4.  We picked to travel over Labor Day to maximize Eric's time off and to maximize the best price on tickets. We left on Thursday night and returned on Tuesday.  Since Eric only works half a day on Friday, he only had to take off that half on Friday and a full day on Tuesday (with Monday being a holiday).

Let's get the fun stuff...and pictures!

My sister-in-law kindly took us to the airport on Thursday night in Kansas City and we were off.  We were a little nervous because Cooper's afternoon nap lasted about 10 minutes in the car (he fell asleep right before we got to my brother and sister-in-law's house) and we were leaving at bedtime.  Luckily for us, he slept most of the flight.  We got into Denver around 8:30pm (mountain time), got our bags, rental car, and we were on our way to our hotel.  We booked our hotel on Hotwire, which is a gamble, but we knew what part of town it was in, and that it had free parking and internet.  Again (cheap skate), I don't like to pay for hotel parking.  So while it would have been fun to stay downtown, we got a better deal, had a nice hotel, and saved $20-30/day.  We stayed at the DoubleTree Denver Tech Center.  So Thursday went well, and we got to the hotel and went to bed!

We got up on Friday morning and scouted out somewhere for breakfast.  We wanted to try this place called Snooze and figured that Friday morning would be our best opportunity for that--since breakfast places usually get pretty busy on weekend mornings.

Eric had the Breakfast Pot Pie

I had the pancake trio- peanut butter cup, chocolate chip, and strawberry fields

After breakfast, we went back to the hotel for Cooper to take his morning nap.  We wanted to have a good mix of things to do, but also try to allow him to have at least some naps in a crib.  When he woke up, we hopped in the car and headed for downtown.  We found online that the Taste of Colorado food festival was Labor Day weekend and it started at 11am on Friday.  Again, being the "avoid the crowds if you can" kind of people, we decided to do that on Friday while people were still working.  They had lots of concerts scheduled for the weekend, but we really just wanted to go down there for the food and atmosphere.

We didn't stay at the Taste of Colorado for very long because it was pretty hot and we wanted to get to the zoo early in the afternoon.  By the time we got to the zoo, it had actually cooled off a little bit with some clouds moving in.  We ended up having perfect weather and we were just getting to the car to leave when it started raining.

Rhino crossing

Little man loved the zoo!

Leaning up to see the okapi

It was fun when we could tell that Cooper could actually find and see the animals.  Like this picture above, he would pull forward so that he could see.  The walls, fences, and rails did make it hard for him to see sometimes--but we could always tell when he saw the animal.

We left the zoo and headed back towards our hotel.  We hit a little bit of traffic going back, and surprisingly Cooper stayed awake during the drive.  He laid down for a late afternoon nap when we got back and then we went to dinner at Macaroni Grill-- hello buy one, get one free coupon :)
That pretty much sums up the first day!