You could tell the women were looking forward to it.

The wife, and our future daughter-in-law.

But me and eldest son? Well, we did alright, as males go, but...

An entire day shopping?

Geez.

There were essential items necessary for the upcoming nuptuals, and so the four of us spent ten hours shopping in Westminster and Broomfield. The trip was ostensibly for acquiring wedding apparel for eldest son, but I'm certain we spent an equal amount of time, if not more, looking for just the right lime-green shoes for the bride and the perfect mauve or blue or pink or green or whatever-color top for the mother of the groom.

'Cause, you see, she's already got the jacket and skirt that coordinate, all she needs is a matching top.

Both female hunting expeditions were unsuccessful. We took care of the groom in the final hour of the safari.

Lunch at the Olive Garden was great. Dinner at the sushi place in the Fort would have been great if it weren't for all the drunks and rowdies wandering around from the town's beer festival. I would have liked to have tried the eel, but putting strange things into my guts is not a wise thing to do that late (9PM) at night anymore.

Getting lost in the semi-industrial part of Broomfield was, well, interesting.

Getting so close to the old favorite, radioactive stomping grounds that we could see above the town was, well, frustrating.

But the real eye-opener of the trip was the shopping areas.

Those who warned of the impending bank failures also warned it would be followed by the mortgage crisis. And after that, they said, would come the collapse of the retail shopping real estate market.

The malls.

Well, we've been kinda watching all those troubles from afar. Our banker explained that the branch in our county has been keeping all the other branches of their interstate bank afloat. And housing prices have stabilized, but they haven't gone down. Being an energy-exporting community tends to shield your economy from the worst.

But being a small town surrounded by miles and miles of nothin', retail business has long been tough. We've had probably a third to half our retail buildings empty for over twenty years. Since the last boom ended.

It's nothing new.

But seeing the effects of the recession in the once-thriving Front Range, well, it's sobering.

We started in the Orchards, an artificial downtown planned and built as a unit, like a huge mall without ceiling or walls and the parking on the inside. A really pleasant place, in a kind of synthetic Disney World way.

And practically devoid of shoppers. I mean, really, huge, expansive, empty parking lots. And sales clerks who dive in and hover as soon as you enter their store. Like you're a rare migrating species, and they're not sure when they'll see another one.

The Westminster Mall was even worse. Empty shell after empty shell. At least half the store fronts were empty, including three of their anchors. Totally, totally depressing. Fellow shoppers were so rare, you would actually nod to each other as you passed through the silent halls.

Most of the food court stalls were vacant. Oddly, both Hot Topic and Spencer's Gifts were surviving, across the hall from each other. Frenzi still exists, and I have concluded it has great clothes for women.

If you're a tiny woman.

But their single clerk was worried. Worried about her job. Worried about the absence of people. Worried about the empty parking lot when she goes home.

I suppose her boss is worried even more.

And then off to the FlatIrons. Where a long idle moment was passed with a dapper clerk from New York City, because there were four of them working on the floor, and we the only customers. And he went down the list, from memory, of all the stores that had packed up and left in their neighborhood.

Again, it was more than half.

But he pointed out many of those started disappearing two, three, or even four years ago. He puts most the blame for this empty-store syndrome on unchecked developers, not the recent downturn of the economy.

Either way, it was reassuring to get back into our state, with crowded lines at the registers and empty places in between.

And not the reverse.