Comrade Brewing
Cherry Creek Watch Company
Boris’s Upholstery
Christmas At Gaylord Rockies Until January 3, 2021
Save Up To 40 Percent With Ticket Bundles
by Mark Smiley
The Covid-19 global pandemic may have dampened the spirits of some but at Gaylord Rockies in Denver, they are doing their best to keep the spirit alive with their Christmas at Gaylord Rockies. Mistletoe Village on the convention center wing of the hotel still features Build a Bear Workshop, cookies with Mrs. Claus, a gingerbread house decorating station, gift shop, and the all new I Love Christmas Movies exhibit. All of these are more spread out than years past, offering a chance for guests to feel more comfortable and social distance.
The west side of the hotel features acres of twinkling lights and decorations and holiday activities including snow tubing, ice bumper boats, Merry-Go-Round and ice skating. The I Love Christmas Movies pop-up experience replaces the Ice exhibit this year (although Ice will return next year). A guide takes small groups through replica movie sets from movies such as Polar Express, Christmas Vacation, Elf, A Christmas Story, and A Year Without Santa Claus.
Although the Christmas spirit is alive at the resort, they have set up stringent safety protocols to keep their guests safe. The resort has directional arrows for walking through the resort and hand sanitizing stations throughout. The Pinyons bar now forms a single file line to order drinks which allows for social distancing. For the time being, the other restaurants offer food to go only. However, the resort does allow outside food to be brought in. Convenient options are services such as Uber Eats or GrubHub.
The demanding standards of cleanliness have risen to an even higher level with new protocols for the current circumstances. Gaylord Rockies has elevated their cleanliness standards and changing hospitality norms. As a part of Marriott International’s family, they have put in place a multi-pronged approach designed to meet the health and safety challenges presented by COVID-19 as outlined in Marriott’s Commitment to Clean.
Enhanced technologies, including the testing of electrostatic sprayers and implementing the highest classification of disinfectants recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization are being used to sanitize surfaces throughout the hotel and convention center.
Gaylord Rockies has implemented extra-stringent daily cleaning procedures that are focused heavily on high touchpoint areas. Public spaces, including, but not limited to, the lobby, aquatic areas, fitness centers, and meetings and convention spaces, have dedicated staff to sanitize frequently throughout the day.
In guest rooms, they have added detailed cleaning practices, requiring all surfaces to be thoroughly cleaned with hospital-grade disinfectants and that this cleaning is done with increased frequency. They have also placed disinfecting wipes in each guest room for guests’ personal use. For more information on their protocols, visit www.gaylordhotelsclean.marriott.com.
Gaylord Rockies is near Denver International Airport and is a Marriott property that opened in December 2018. The 486,000 square feet of convention space makes it the largest combined resort and convention center in Colorado. It is the fifth Gaylord property to open with the others located in Washington, D.C., Nashville, Orlando, and Dallas.
The Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center is located at 6700 North Gaylord Rockies Boulevard. For more information about the resort or to make a reservation, visit www.gaylordrockies.com. Christmas at Gaylord Rockies runs until January 3, 2021. For more information or for tickets to the events, visit www.christmasatgaylordrockies.marriott.com.
Denver Board Of Education’s Newest Mission: Eliminate Quality Education For All
In Denver, these days you get a choice between the “Corporatists” like Mayor Hancock and former mayors Federico Peña and Wellington Webb, and the “Radicals” like Candi CdeBaca and the majority of the newest Denver School Board. There is, these days, no other viable alternative. Neither group is all bad or all good but together they are helping to destroy the city. Back in his first run for Denver mayor, Federico Peña’s slogan was “Imagine a Great City.” Today the slogan appears to be “Imagine a Really Crappy City.”
The Corporatists under Mayor Hancock have made their contribution to a crappy city by destroying as many open spaces and parks as humanly possible. Denver has gone from one of the leading cities in percentage of open space and parks per resident to one of the worst in the United States. The Corporatists, of course, wish to exploit any city asset built up over generations to make money for themselves and their friends, like high-density developers and lobbyists/lawyers. To the credit of the Radicals, they are not on board with this grotesque program and are the ones fighting the mayor and his friends to preserve what is left.
The Radicals on the Denver Board of Education, on the other hand, are doing there best to destroy quality education in the City and County of Denver, aided and abetted by Denver’s teachers’ union. The teachers’ union in Chicago has declared that in-school learning is “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny,” and many of Denver’s unionized teachers would certainly agree.
The Radicals on the Denver Board of Education are led by none other than Tay Anderson who won an at-large seat in 2019. He is not a big believer in education, having barely gotten out of Manual High School himself in 2017. He demands that if you talk to him that you address him as “Director” Anderson. More recently he has been nicknamed “The Round Mound of Flop Downs.” Mr. Anderson does not appear to have any means of support. The Board job is without compensation. His Board bio shows no present employment. But there are other ways to make money.
Back in July, he was at the homeless encampment by the State Capitol when he said he was pushed by the police, although video appears only to show him flopping down. He claims he went to a hospital, but the hospital was never identified. He set up a Go Fund Me Page for “medical expenses” without ever identifying what those expenses were. Nonetheless he took in over $13,000. He also hired a lawyer and presumably got a payday from the city.
But money never lasts long. In December, he did another flop down at an unidentified Target, this time claiming severe chest pains caused his collapse. He had previously tapped Target, claiming that he and his brother had been racially profiled at another unidentified Target, and received a swift apology from corporate headquarters and who knows what else. Why you want to continue to shop at a store that you claim racially profiled and harassed you is a little strange, but we are sure Mr. Anderson has his reasons. It has not been disclosed whether he has hired legal counsel for his latest flop down.
What Mr. Anderson and his fellow Radicals want to end is children having any choice on where they go to school, an idea on which the Denver teachers’ union heartily agrees.
The word “competition” is an anathema to them. The schoolteachers’ union opposes charter and magnate schools, and the Radicals ran on limiting, or even getting rid of, educational opportunities for kids in the City and County of Denver. The Corporatists, including Mayor Hancock, had strongly supported school choice with money coming in for school board races by developers and others. This support for school choice was not out of any eleemosynary belief in education, but they realized with only lousy, non-competitive schools in Denver, less people would be willing to move to Denver and fill up all those high-density condos and apartments. But the corporate support largely dried up in 2019 leaving only the money from the schoolteachers’ union for the 2019 election which resulted in the Radicals winning.
The Radicals relatively quickly drove out widely praised school superintendent Susana Cordova who is a child of Mexican American immigrant parents and the first college graduate in the family. She went to Denver schools and began teaching in them starting in 1989. She is leaving Denver for a much less prestigious and lower paying job in the Dallas Texas Independent School District. She stated she is leaving Denver because Dallas “reminds her a lot of the Denver I grew up in.”
Obviously, today’s Denver does not remind her of the Denver she grew up in. Moreover, she also does not believe the present “Imagine a Crappy City” contest between the Corporatists and the Radicals will improve matters any. Will there ever be a movement for something other than the Corporatists and the Radicals? Ms. Cordova does not believe anything will develop anytime soon and unfortunately neither do we.
— Editorial Board
