She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain

I found out that tours of the Mint were free and the last time I was in Washington D.C. they weren't doing them due to heightened security so I took advantage and signed us up for a tour. It was rather short, probably about half an hour, but it was still pretty cool to see the money being made and know the process of how it works. Our tour guide was a little cheesy, which cracked me up. At the beginning of the tour he said, "The Mint. The only place where the government actually makes "cents"." HAHAHAHA I thought it was great :) The only downfall to the Mint tour was the amount of security rules you had to follow. You weren't allowed to bring a purse or any sort of bag and no camera's so that's why the only pictures I have are of the outside of the building. Still pretty cool either way.

We didn't get to the Red Rock Amphitheater the day before because they had a concert going on and it would have been impossible to get up there, so we went back up again the next day. I'm SO glad we did because it was absolutely gorgeous as you can see from the pictures. You could see all of downtown Denver from way up there. I think the coolest part was that you could see the different layers of earth in each of the protruding rock sheets. Pretty much like going back in time.

 Left: This is one of the HUGE rocks at the entrance to the amphitheater.

Right: I know the left one doesn't look that big, but here's a picture of Jen in front of the rock and you can see that you obviously can't see the top and it's HUGE!!

Taken with my 75-300mm lens, zoomed all the way to 300mm from atop the Red Rocks. 

It was quite a trek just to get down to the amphitheater, but when we did there were TONS of people exercising by running UP the seats or the stairs. There was one guy, probably in his early 50's who did it twice while we were there!! It was crazy. 

There were tons of deer all around, but they're called Mule Deer, obviously because they look like mules. But they have the biggest, cutest deer ears I've ever seen. There's a great picture a few down of a close up of one of them.

Yay for long exposures!! That's Denver in the background. I didn't quite realize how big Denver was until we sat up in the mountains at night starring at it. 

This was a new restaurant that opened up recently in Denver and I HAD to stop and take a picture because it cracked me up so much. I really, REALLY want a shirt from there. It makes me wonder what kind of food that they serve there...