Tag: Cheesman Park

Weekend Things

Lauren1 Comment

It’s official.  While making a Friday evening trip to Ikea (never again!) we heard the countdown to Christmas music on the radio and now BAM!  It’s the holidays.  I guess it makes sense seeing as Thanksgiving is next this week.  It’s coincided with some actual cold weather (it snowed last week!), so yeah, it’s feeling pretty holiday-ish.

After that hour long drive to Ikea, we met up with friends — Jenn lives nearby and happened to be out getting dinner — and enjoyed some Irish Pub food and beer.  Then we headed to a concert (!) where we met Bobby and Becca.

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We actually know someone in a band.  That plays actual shows in Denver.  How cool is that?  The show had a few different bands opening for the headliner, PLACES, who was playing their last show.  I’d never heard of them but a girl in the audience was crying during their performance so they apparently had some die-hard fans.  PLACES and Rumours Follow (the band we knew) were both really good.

The second half of Saturday was kinda packed so we I made sure to spend the first half relaxing.  Someone insisted on removing the first few rows on tile in our kitchen because we’re having hardwoods put in next week!  I insisted on making pancakes, catching up on Parenthood and going for a run.  Also, our friend and photographer Chris brought over some pictures from our engagement party.  How precious is this one of my dad and I?

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Or maybe that’s a “sorry I gave a toast even after you told me not to” hug.  Either way, I love it.  After all that, we met with a local stationary store to talk Save the Dates.  Pretty sure I was just asking Joey how places like that get enough business to afford rent in the highlands but it was packed the entire time we were there.  So what do I know?  Then we made some quick visits to our wedding venues to show them to Joey’s dad.

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Cheesman Park was looking beautiful as usual.  And the sunset view was pretty awesome too. This was the first time we’d been to the park since reserving it at the beginning of the month and it felt pretty special knowing we’re actually getting married there.  We also stopped by our reception venue, which happened to be hosting a wedding later that night.  It was so helpful to see it all set up, plus I had Hannah come so I can bother her with all sorts of set up questions.  That’s what the Matron of Honor is there for, right? 😛

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Pizza for all afterwards!  We tried Pizzeria Locale for the first time and I was kinda sorta not all that impressed.  While I loved the whole assembly line, get to watch them cook right in front of you, personal size pizza thing, the entire bottom of mine was charred and call me crazy, but I’m not a huge fan of the flavor of burnt crust.  Which totally didn’t stop me from eating three of the four pieces.  Afterwards, Joey and I headed to the Nuggets game.  Does it seem like this day is never ending?

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I’d like to pretend I as all revved up after an exciting Nuggets win (just barely!) and did something really fun afterwards, but instead I went home and fell asleep on the couch halfway through SNL.  More specifically, half way through Weekend Update.  That’s the best part, can’t they put it a little closer to the beginning of the show?!  P.S. How AMAZING does the SNL line up for December look.  I basically freaked out when I saw Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake in the same episode.

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Sunday started with this quiche from Common Grounds (why is it always so packed in there?!) that I deemed the second best quiche I’ve ever tasted.  Mom always wins for the first best.  I think it was leek and cheese?  And also a pretty latte that had me buzzing all.day.long.  Afterwards, we bought ski passes!  My cousin from Nola is coming to town at the end of December and really wants to give the whole skiing/snowboarding thing a try.  I’m wondering if anyone will notice when I go hide in the lodge.

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Later I joined Jenn and Alyssa at their place for mimosas, food and… football, which I’m pretty sure I paid 0% attention to.  Who can pay attention to a bunch of guys running around in the cold when there’s homemade guac and enchiladas?  I ended up “watching” the end of the Broncos game at home.  And by that, I mean every time the AMAs went to commercial Joey would change the channel back to the game and I would immediately zone out, but OUCH, that was a rough ending.  And I’m referring to both the end of the game and the AMAs.  Taylor Swift for best artist again?  Please no.

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So now it’s Monday, our kitchen floor looks like this and I have so much work to do, but it’s a three day work week and I’ve got Christmas music playing so I’m ready to fly through it and get to Thanksgiving!

Happy Monday!

We Got a Wedding Date

Lauren4 Comments

Hello!  I’m just popping in with a rare Saturday post to talk about the craziness that occurred yesterday.  It all started a couple months ago when I was Googling Denver weddings and saw one that took place at a public park.  I thought it was beautiful and felt so much more connected to it than I did to any of the other wedding venues we’d been looking at.  I also felt much more connected to the price 🙂  And so the idea of having our wedding ceremony at Cheesman Park was born.

A couple days later, my mom found an article taking about how people line up the night before Denver park permits are given out just to secure their wedding date at Denver’s most popular parks and we suddenly realized if we wanted our park we’d be doing that too.  While Cheesman isn’t thee most popular park to host a wedding in Denver, we didn’t want to chance it so we made a plan to be in line by 4:30 AM on Friday morning.  At 2 AM, we were both wide awake and decided to just head over.  Joey had driven by the line around 9:30 the night before and when we showed up around 3 AM there were probably less than 10 more people in line.

We brought chairs, blankets, snacks and many layers of clothes (standing in line for the KBCO Studio C CD release trained me well), but there were tents set up everywhere from the people who had camped out all night.  At 6 AM (you know, just three hours of sitting outside in the dark and cold), we were given tickets and ushered inside.  To wait for another SIX hours.  They took couples in groups of 15 to get their park permit and each group took longer and longer as more and more dates were taken.  Inside the waiting room, there was this crazy mix between camaraderie — all of us couples anxiously waiting for our turn and hoping the date we wanted was still open — and paranoia — all of us looking around the room, wondering if the person sitting next to us was going to book our park/date before we did.

Finally, our group was called and taken downstairs to the permit office.  At this point, we’d been told a bunch of dates that had been taken (mostly for two other parks), but we hadn’t head ours so we were pretty optimistic.  Which made it even harder when we were told our date was taken 😦  We had even taken a save the date picture at our engagement session last week hoping the date would work out so it was sad news, but luckily we were able to book a date a couple weeks earlier, which was just as good.  We really only had our hearts set on September 20th because it would be exactly a year from when we got engaged and it would’ve been kind of poetic but September 6th will still be perfect.  There was a couple who had gotten in line at 11 PM the night before and still ended up in our same group of 15.  The look on the bride’s face as the city official read off all the taken dates and she had to keep crossing them off her list until nothing was left was so sad, but they ended up with something that worked so it was a happy ending.

This probably all sounds slightly crazy and a lot of trouble to go through just for a park, but I actually had a lot of fun hanging out all day with Joey.  Plus it makes for a good story 🙂

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This is the ticket they gave us just before we went inside.  Joey — and every other ticket holder — kept pulling it out of his pocket to make sure it was still there all day.  And then they no one ever looked at it.  I guess it makes for a good souvenir.