The Crawford Hotel

From the airport, The Crawford is one train ride away: the A Line runs 23 miles into Denver Union Station in about 37 minutes, and the hotel is upstairs. Its 112 rooms ring the station's 65-foot Great Hall, in a carved-granite Beaux-Arts building that opened in 1914 and had gone to seed by the end of the century. Dana Crawford, the preservationist behind the revival of Larimer Square, led the effort that reopened it in 2014, and the hotel took her name. The hall has arched windows and chandeliers like giant lanterns, and the old ticket office is now the Terminal Bar. The Pullman rooms are modelled on the sleeper car, but the room to book is the LoDo Suite, on the fourth floor, with a skylight, dark floral paper across its sloping ceiling and a freestanding bath beside a bare timber beam. Over the bath hangs a painting of two white deer, watchful company for a soak.

Recommended for grown-ups who would rather see Denver on foot and by train than from a hire car. Coors Field is a ten-minute walk, and the courtesy car covers anywhere within two miles. The gym and fitness classes at The Oxford Club across the street are free, for anyone who wants to earn breakfast at Snooze, in the station, where guests who ask the day before get priority seating. The Terminal Bar keeps an extended happy hour for guests, and Mercantile, where Alex Seidel, a James Beard Award winner, cooks seasonal American food, is in the station too. A dog of up to 60 pounds can come. For a show at Red Rocks, ten miles south-west, the shuttle leaves from the station, and nobody on board has a shorter walk to the stop.