Departing Denver

Started: 2025-10-29 20:50:03

Submitted: 2025-10-29 21:21:26

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A few anecdotes from flying out of Denver

After visiting Colorado State University for a campus tour, Calvin and I drove down from Fort Collins to Denver to fly home. Once we reached Longmont, heading south on I-25 towards the airport, I knew exactly where we were and recognized every exit and every turn from living in Boulder County for 25 years.

On the rental shuttle to the airport terminal I helped out a passenger by explaining the airport layout (it's one terminal, the bus will loop around to the east side, most people get out on the west side, but if you're checking bags with an airline that isn't United the other side is probably easier), leveraging a key piece of airport navigation muscle memory that's still valid almost a decade after I moved away from Colorado.

(The day I flew home was ten years, to the day, from the day I interviewed at Google in Mountain View for an SRE job in San Francisco.)

Since the last time I flew out of Denver, the security screening checkpoints have been moved off the floor of the main terminal (designated as the fifth floor, counting up from the lowest level of the terminal parking garages) into the wings of the terminal (the sixth floor). There is no longer a separate screening checkpoint on the bridge to Concourse A, but passengers can still walk across the bridge from the main screening checkpoints. We were flying United so we took the people-mover to Concourse B, via an extra-long escalator descending from the sixth floor through the main floor of the terminal (under the tent roof that's supposed to match the snow-covered mountain peaks) to the boarding area below.

Descending the escalator to the people mover at DIA

When we got to Concourse B we surveyed the options for food and found that Voodoo Doughnut had escaped containment in Portland and set up an outpost on the ring of restaurants on the upper level of the concourse, complete with an alien being held in the secret tunnels under the airport.

Alien in the secret tunnels under DIA

We got a picture with the alien, and we both got Portland cream doughnuts as a mid-morning snack before getting a sandwich to eat on the plane.

Calvin and Jaeger with an alien in the secret tunnels under DIA

Our flight to San Jose and drive home across the mountain were uneventful. We arrived in the middle of the afternoon, giving me plenty of time to work on laundry (my normal Sunday chore) and debrief with Kiesa on everything I had learned from our first college tour.