Day Eleven - Denver to Black Hawk

Our third day in Aurora, and last day to spend some time with our son Arthur, before leaving for the shortest leg of our adventure.

As we got ready to leave Arthur's, this little guy came out from under a bush:

This young rabbit had no fear of us and continued foraging
while we all jumped into Arthur's car and headed off.

Our first destination:  The Butterfly Pavillion in Westminster, Colorado.  Established in 1995, it was the first non-profit insect zoo in the United States.  In addition to butterflies, the Pavillion has avariety of unusual insects and invertebrates, wet and dry.

One of the stranger animals we've seen; looks like a writhing
bowl of jello, without the bowl.

These two critters were busy moving all their parts, but the
wholes moved nowhere at all.

Upside-down jellyfish, look like cakes with bent candles.

Several displays featured tarantulas from from many places, some rather small and some giants.  The old guy below made a display of himself by accepting one of the latter ones to hold for a while.

Here's an overweight senior citizen accepting a gift of a
giant tarantula.

From the other invertebrate section we moved through the air lock to the butterfly side of the insect zoo.  Because the weather outside was rainy and dark, and the roof is one large skylight, most of the butterflies were alighted on leaves within the jungle-like environment.

Twice a day one of the keeper-instructors bring out all the
newly-metamorphosed butterflies and moths, to the delight
of kids.  The face at far left is Mary Frances.

A monarch at rest.

Beautiful flowers with tendrils.

And without.

This guy looks huge but is only about two inches across.

A monarch hitches a ride on Arthur.

A couple of buddies.

It was an interesting couple of hours, and I'm not sure which we found more entertaining, the butterflies or the little kids reacting to them.  After leaving (through the gift shop, naturally) we repaired to Romano's Macaroni Grill for a pleasant lunch.

After a brief visit back at Arthur's, it was time to head west again, in a downpour:

We've seen quite a bit of this in past few legs of this trip.

But as soon as we crossed over the first mountain pass, the sky lifted, and we left the highway for smaller roads through the rocks and tunnels:

To Blackhawk!

The Lady Luck Casino and Hotel.

Mary Frances and I had booked a night here, because we recalled an earlier trip during which we had both fun and profit.  We got a pleasant room on the ninth floor of the hotel, settled in, then made our way down to the foot bridge across the road to the the casino.

The beginning of the casino floor, from the top of the escalator.

Only a fool walks into a casino expecting to win.  That's why self-discipline is the most important factor in gambling.  Self-discipline means deciding in advance how much money you'll feed those hungry little machines.  If means keeping whatever you win, not ever putting it back into the machine.  And it means when you reach the time that you spent the money you came to spend, and collected the money the slots gave back, you get out of Dodge.  Or in this case, Blackhawk.  All that said, there are times when you are pleasantly surprised, and this was one of them.  In about two hours we doubled our investment.  

The icing on the cake was that, for the first time on this trip, the Red Sox were on national TV, playing the Tigers on ESPN.  Since we had left the casino early, we got back to the room in time for the last couple of innings.  Detroit was ahead 3-2 in the top of the ninth with Holt and Pedroia on base, when Big Papi clocked one 20 rows over the fence.  Koji Uehara mowed 'em down in the bottom of the ninth and the sox won 5-3, just like my brother-in-law told me they would.