THURSDAY, 9 NOVEMBER 2023

(Denver, CO – Atlanta, GA)

There didn’t appear to have been any more overnight snow. Rather, we must have driven through the worst of it. The storm had come in early. The sky was pure blue again and, when we went down to breakfast, we could see that the front range of the Rocky Mountains were sparkly and white in the sunshine. There followed a final bit of suitcase juggling (not literally, we weren’t throwing them around) while we balanced the need to physically fit things in the cases, and get them all under the weight limit at the same time.

At the car, it was apparent that the windscreen was frozen. Last year we had a frozen windscreen at the Grand Canyon, and no scraper…so I remembered to pack one this year. Added to that, Alamo has provided one this year (presumably it’s more normal in Denver compared with Las Vegas!). Thus, fully equipped with two scrapers, we hadn’t needed one, until today. With this done, we took our last ride in the car the short distance to the car rental centre, and hopped onto a shuttle bus for the terminal building.

We managed to print out own bag tags, but were again rescued at this point by a Delta employee, who attached them for us far more speedily than we could have done. We dropped them off at the counter, and then headed for security. The advertised time for this activity was 14 minutes. To our surprise, 14 minutes later, we we had moved through security, unpacked everything in our hand luggage in the process, repacked it, put our shoes back on and were ready to go to the shuttle train to take us to the departure gates.

The gate was supposedly A48…and it remained A48 right up to departure. We had lunch before boarding, a grilled cheese baguette for me, and a turkey baguette for Andrew. We completely confused them by asking for the cheese in Andrew’s sandwich to be removed, and for it not to be toasted. This was obviously considered weird behaviour.

Once on board the plane, the pilot said the flight time would be around 2 hours and 18 minutes, with the winter storms creating some fast westerly winds. He did warn that this might come with some turbulence though. I kept my window blinds shut for most of the flight, as the sun was hot, streaming in through the window, but when I did look, we were back to a vista of clouds with no ground in sight. The flight was mostly smooth, notwithstanding the captain’s warning, apart from a few minutes in the middle of the flight that made me glad I’d finished my drink. The sun was setting as we landed, creating nice light amongst the clouds, but the air quality was poor and it was hazy on final approach.

After landing we retrieved our cases, and headed to see if we could catch that elusive shuttle bus to the hotel. Much to our surprise, it turned up just moments after we did. Listening in to the other passengers, they had been waiting 45 minutes and had phoned the hotel…we got lucky.

After checking in, we had dinner in the hotel and then settled back for a leisurely evening.