(Why Denver has its city elections in May I have no idea.)
I didn't remember about voting until I was two blocks on my way to work. This is why driving is evil: if I had been on my bike, turning around and going to City Park Pavillion would have been no problem at all. But I drove because I am going to make a CostCo run at lunch.
The park I know so well on foot or by bike, the Martin Luther King statute, the Robert Burns, the other, metaphorical one, the Museum of Nature and Science, the zoo, the rose garden, the lilac shrubbery, the pavillion, the pond on the south side of the zoo that should be plumbed for new disease-bearing (or -curing) microbes, the bigger pond in which my friend's brother-in-law's father swam and contracted polio 50 years ago, just like FDR, the playground named for a little boy who drowned in that pond, the not exactly great lawn that's the best place to fly a kite...that park is a great black hole to me in a car.
I knew about the parking lot behind the pavillion. Weddings occur there, and concerts and other events: trucks must be able to bring in equipment and no one could expect a wedding party to trek across the goose poop-addled expanses of turf. How to get there, that was the problem. I turned west onto 15th, two blocks south of the park's border. I should have turned north and got on 17th, but much of City Park South is having new sewers dug in and some of the roads, including those with traffic lights that enable a left turn, are closed. I turned north on York, the park's west border. I remembered a road on that side, under a gate like l'Arc de Triomphe (somewhat smaller). But no, that road was closed. I knew 23rd, the northern border, would be no good: it's all zoo and sports fields and museum. (Only now does the access road along the south side of the zoo, that approaches the pavillion, accessible between zoo and museum, occur to me. The construction of a parking garage would have confused me anyway.) South on Colorado again, I turned right into the museum. I found another road looping through the park, gated off. Okay. Now west on 17th again. Almost at York, therefore after skittering around the full perimeter of the park, I turned into the park at the "Esplanade" (there is no water), circled Robert Burns, parked, illegally I'm sure, in the MLK circle, and scurried the rest of the way to the pavillion--still with no idea how to get to the parking lot.
There's a reason voter turnout is low. If I'd remembered, I could have walked over at 7:00 like a civilized person and not been late to work. But I wasn't tragically late and I took a sprig of lilac for my hair, so it worked out.
Cars are evil. I voted. There will be a run-off election in a month. Further reports as events warrant.