Day 16: A Denver Rest Day — Wire Faces, Water Lilies, and World Cup Soccer

2026 Rally4Vets America Grand Tour

After more than two weeks, a few thousand miles, and more goosebump moments than we can count — Yellowstone, the Little Bighorn, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, three veteran posts in a single afternoon — today we did something almost radical: we stopped.

Denver gave us a proper rest day, and we took it.

Recharging in the Mile High City

For me, that meant catching up on a serious backlog of email — though I’ll admit the discipline slipped a little when the 2026 FIFA World Cup came on. With the tournament being co-hosted right here in North America this summer, I caught Colombia vs. Portugal live from Miami while I worked, Rally4Vets tumbler close at hand. Multitasking, veteran road-trip style.

Rest days matter more than people think — on a journey like this, and frankly in life. You can’t pour from an empty tank, and the mission deserves a crew that’s recharged for the road ahead. So we recharged.

A Garden of Shared Humanity

While I tackled the inbox, my co-driver made the very most of Denver — starting at the beautiful Denver Botanic Gardens, which happens to be celebrating its 75th anniversary this year.

The timing was lucky. The Gardens are currently hosting “A New Humanism,” the first-ever U.S. retrospective of the renowned Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. The centerpiece stops you in your tracks: two enormous human heads, sculpted from delicate steel wire mesh, floating above the lily-pad pond and facing one another — a pair named “Julia” and “Lou,” caught in what the artist calls a silent conversation. They seem to hover over the water like thoughts made visible, the koi and water lilies drifting beneath them.

Inside the galleries, Plensa fills the room with human figures built entirely out of letters — alphabets from Arabic to Japanese to Greek, welded together into bodies that float like clouds. The idea behind them is simple and quietly powerful: just as single letters only gain meaning when they come together into words, we human beings only become whole when we come together across our differences. The whole exhibition is about our shared humanity — the things that connect us across every culture and border.

I’ll be honest: that theme hits close to home for a tour like ours. We’ve spent these weeks crossing a big, varied country, sitting down with veterans in small-town posts from Oregon to Nebraska, and finding the same thing everywhere — that what we share runs deeper than what separates us. A garden full of art saying exactly that felt right.

And the gardens themselves were in full summer glory: water lilies blooming pink across dark ponds, deep wine-red daylilies blazing in the sun. A good place to breathe.

Coin Number One at Post Number One

Then my co-driver made a stop right in the heart of what we do: dropping a Rally4Vets Challenge Coin at VFW Post 1 in Denver.

Post Number One. The very first. You’re standing in a hall whose bar still bears the name “John S. Stewart Camp No. 1, Army of the Philippines” — a direct link back to the Spanish-American War veterans who helped start this whole organization well over a century ago. The walls are layered with portraits and history, a giant flag behind the bar, and the unmistakable feeling of a place where the torch has been carried a very long time. You couldn’t ask for a more fitting spot to leave a coin. First coin of the day, dropped at Post Number One. We like that symmetry.

Looking South — and a Bittersweet Note

Tomorrow, the tone changes. We point the car toward Amarillo, Texas, and a new chapter begins — the long run south and east toward Orlando and, eventually, Washington, DC.

From here to Orlando, I’m driving solo.  Tomorrow, my second co-driver heads home to Virginia. The car’s going to feel a little quiet without that second seat filled. But the mission rolls on, the coins are still in the console, and there are a whole lot of veterans between here and Florida who need to know somebody’s driving for them.

For today, though: rest, gratitude, a full tank, and two giant wire faces reminding us that for all our differences, we’re far more alike than not.

7 days until we turn 250!

The Rally4Vets 2026 America Grand Tour isn’t a road trip. It’s a moving act of remembrance; a celebration of the country and the people who created it.

  • Connect with the tour at www.rally4vets.com.
  • Follow the team in real time at: https://itl.ink/2026AmericaGrandTour
  • Donate to our current service dog in training: https://donorbox.org/2026-service-dog-program