Meow Wolf
Over the weekend I visited the Denver location of Meow Wolf. Meow Wolf was started in Santa Fe in 2008 and has opened a few other locations since then. Each location has a wide variety of immersive and interactive art. The Denver location is called Convergence Station and is an interdimensional transport hub linking together various different worlds. The different worlds each have their own style and theme that mix facets of Earth with alien. The art is very fractal – there's more levels of detail the closer you look at things. My favorite room is a street scene with Blade Runner-esque vehicles and futuristically weird businesses along the street. There are a few pictures of that below.
It's a very hectic and overwhelming thing to visit. I don't think it was particularly busy when I visited it, but it's not a place for someone who dislikes crowds, noises, or visually busy places. It is not a calm place. But I am not that person, so I found it enjoyable and interesting. If you ever visit a city with a Meow Wolf, I think it's worth checking it out.
more ...
Denver Botanic Gardens
Here are a few photos from today's visit to the Denver Botanic Gardens. We visited a few months ago during the winter (on a nice day) and it was nice to see the gardens in full springtime bloom.
more ...
Zoo March 2017
We have a membership, so we go often, and we wanted to see the [newborn Giraffe](http://www.denverpost.com/2017/03/01/denver-zoo-baby-giraffe-dobby-born/). There is also a new Tiger exhibit, which is quite nice.
more ...
'The Denver Museum of Nature & Science'
Yesterday Melissa and I went to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Like many big-city science museums, it is targeted towards the ankle-biter set, but it is still fun for fuddy-duddy adults like us. If there is a theme for the museum, it's Colorado and Western history, which is dominated by mining and resource extraction. There is a very large and impressive collection of gems, many of which originated in Colorado. I didn't take as many photos as I should have, and it was difficult to take good photos in the dim light, but below is an example of how amazing some of them are. For some reason, they have a very large topaz gemstone that was previously owned by Salvador Dali.
There is also a space sciences exhibit with plenty of hands-on displays for children to interact with. The one I liked best is a meteoroid simulator that is Rube Goldberg-esque. Enclosed is a sand pit with a pressurized nozzle above that shoots ball bearings downward into the sand. The bearings make a crater in the sand that is similar to what a meteoroid does to a planet. When all the bearings have been shot, an automated rake sweeps the sand, dumping them into a sluice that feeds a chain lift, closing the cycle. It's debatable how much some of the children were learning from it, but it is fun.
On the West side of the museum is a very nice atrium with an excellent view of downtown Denver and the front range. I'm sure that the foreground looks better in the summer when the grass is green, but in the winter the snow-capped peaks make up for that. If you look carefully in the full-sized panorama, you can see the gold dome of the State Capitol, and a flock of some ubiquitous Canada Geese.
