We woke up to our alarms set for 6:30am, only to be greeted with a text message telling us that our 10am flight to SFO was cancelled. Thankfully, United had already booked us on the next available flight, but it wasn't until 2:30pm. We were already awake by this stage, so we got up and found some breakfast at a nearby diner.
We had our first sweet breakfast in quite a while (I've grown pretty fond of breakfast burritos), sharing a stack of blueberry pancakes. Katie asked for the whipped cream on the side, which was lucky as it was extremely artificial. It was still in exactly the same shape in the bowl when the waiter came to clear our plates away.
I'd also asked for some fresh milk, as I don't really like the little plastic cups of UHT that are always sitting on the table at places like this. They just seem so wasteful! Unfortunately our server misinterpreted me, and came back a few seconds later with two big glasses of milk for us to drink!
Even though we were still serveral hours early for our flight we figured we'd go to the airport and find somewhere comfortable to sit. I'd found a park-and-fly place called The Parking Spot to leave our car for the week, so that was our first stop. They have good, obvious branding, with their shuttle bus painted yellow with black spots. Their parking system worked quite well too; even though it was just a huge open carpark, they had their shuttle bus waiting at the next available space so you only had to walk a few metres. After we got on the bus they shut the doors and drove us over to Denver International Airport.
DEN is a big airport (and apparently has the longest public runway in the USA!), but they deal with people a whole lot better than we've experienced in other busy airports (looking at you LAX). After checking in at the United desk we were approached by an airport host and asked if we needed help finding where to go! We didn't know the gate number of our flight yet (it hadn't been assigned when we checked in), but he told us that all United flights depart from the B concourse, and so told us the best way to get there. Security was a breeze, and the TSA agents were nice to us!
The flight to SFO was pretty uneventful. I had a window seat, and spent half the flight looking out over the flat expanse of American farmland, most of which was covered in a haze of wildfire smoke.