Cheezer and Louzer

Here are some more videos from my trip to Colorado.

This is Thornton. I liked it just fine but it’s a bit too far North, I think, for us.

This is Golden – the home of Coors, no less. Very nice little mountain town but a bit remote and I hear there may be a big old highway coming through town in a couple of years.

This is Bradburn Village in Westminster CO. New Urbanism. Yes.

So I’m in the Denver Colorado area this weekend, driving around and checking out neighborhoods. It’s been about 20 degrees outside and has been snowing on and off for the last two and a bit days. I like the snow a lot though, so it’s fine.

Most of my Saturday was consumed with driving around parts of Northwest Denver metro area, checking out Westminster and Arvada. My employer’s office is in Arvada so that’s why I started up here. I like these areas a lot, they seem familiar to me. Both cities have been settled for a longish time so both have older and newer neighborhoods for us to pick from.

Westminster, CO is the city my hotel is in and it’s a bit bigger than Arvada. There are homes built as far back as the late 1800’s, more from the 1980’s and some brand new too. I visited one new place called Bradburn Village, which is known as a New Urbanist neighborhood. That means most of the houses there are built with the garages in the back of the house, so the front side only has a nice porch and so, hopefully, people can congregate and get to know each other along the main street. I wonder if it really works that way though. I will drive through it once more during the day to check that out, but on my first drive through, I only noticed how narrow those streets are and how there were lots of cars parked on them. Westminster has a lot of nice big parks though and omany other neighborhoods to be checked out.

Arvada looks good too. Just like most other places around Denver, people have been living here for over one hundred years. It has an “Old Town” section with narrow store-fronted streets and homes built 50 years ago and it has many newer ‘hoods too. I really liked one called Skyline Estates on the West side that’s pretty new looking and right next to a few big sports parks. Way up in the North West corner is a development called Village of Five Parks and it was nice too but very new. That means it’s sparsely landscaped still and kind of shoe boxey looking. They seem to be trying for a master-planned kind of feel but I didn’t really get that vibe while I was there. I did have lunch at a coffee shop in it’s tiny little town center and that was nice and cozy and homey. People came in and chatted with the folks there and seemed to be happy enough.

Today I’m going to explore a little more East of my office, and check out downtown Denver if I have time.