The Mane Event

Every year in early November the kids' school has a big fundraiser, usually at a hotel, with a silent auction, dinner, and a live auction.  The last couple years we've stayed at a hotel and The Girl has been in charge of her brother and a couple of his friends for the evening.

This year the event was at the Brown Palace Hotel, in downtown Denver, instead of at a chain in the suburbs.  I was (am?) actually in a bit of trouble, because when I tried to make reservations at the Brown, I found out that there was no way to have adjoining rooms or to guarantee rooms on the same floor to make The Girl's babysitting task easier...however, the Brown is connected to the Comfort Suites, which, amazingly, have suites. With some reluctance (tempered by the fact that a two bedroom two bathroom suite at the "other" hotel was only slightly more than a "Queen bed room" at the Brown) I booked a suite and was assured that the two hotels were connected by the "heated skybridge" so we could easily "run over" and back.  In a long-ish saga, that I'm not even going to try to explain here, we ended up not in the two bedroom suite, but in two one-bedroom suites on the same floor--no worries!  After finally getting into our fancy clothes, we four adults hopped in the elevator and headed for the 2nd floor to traipse across the street via the heated sky bridge.  But, lo and behold...when the elevator doors opened, we discovered that our event was actually on the Comfort Suites side of and on the bridge (yay!). In fact, the elevator was right in the middle of the festivities. Huh, aren't I amazing? Ok, I'm still in trouble because we didn't have the opportunity to stay in a potentially haunted Brown Palace room.  But seriously, a room at the CS could be haunted, too! It took so long to clean so we could get into the second room that we wondered if they were cleaning up after a murder or something...eesh.

The event appears to have been a success--we came home with several silent auction items and a live auction win to this cabin for spring break. We actually "won" it a few years ago, too and spent a week there with Mr IM's Dad, sister, and brother in law.  This time we'll be joined by some families from the kids school and potentially Grandude.

Sunday morning we enjoyed our "free" breakfast (mmm....complimentary continental breakfast), did a little sightseeing of the Brown and headed home to get ready for the week.

As we were leaving we chatted and decided that while the event was awesome and it was really fun to have in a historic venue...that next year we kind of hope they return to the land of suburbia and bigger rooms--it was pretty crowded while we all browsed the silent auction goodies in the hallway and waited for dinner!