DEN West Garage Parking Ominous Realities

Justme

Veteran
Feb 29, 2004
521
38
It was just yesterday. My day was going well enough. I had parked East Garage lot earlier in the day to drop off older son for SWA DEN-MCO. I made the mistake of pulling into the garage at the first turn in after the Level 1 entrance. That put us in the R section of the 4th level. We walked the entire length of the garage to reach the elevator at the B section. No big deal, we weren't running late. But I tucked that info into my hip pocket so that when I returned to pick up younger son later that evening, I wouldn't have to walk as far.
 
And so I chose to park in the West Garage lot on my return so that I could stop at the American ticket counter for a gate pass to meet my son.
 
I'm pretty smart, so I figured I would go to the very last entry point to the West Garage. And then my intelligence level was verified when I found myself only about a 1 minute walk to the elevator from section B on Level 3.
 
I said West Garage lot, Level 3.  Level 3...
 
Met my son at the gate and we headed to the West Garage lot elevators on level 5. We entered an elevator with 6 or 7 other people, I was at the controls and heard 1 and 2, I was going to 3. And so I kept pushing those 3 buttons but the lights kept going out. That apparently freaked out a couple of people, and they got off before we figured out what the problem was.
 
One of the people saw that I was pressing 3, and they said that I was messing everybody else up, please stop pressing 3. Ummm, what? So they said it's a long story, and because of some issue with the baggage system the West Garage lot elevators don't stop on level 3. (that's odd, because we sure enough got the elevator to come to us when we hailed it earlier)
 
Okay..
 
So we rode down to level 2 with the idea of walking up one flight of stairs. Once at level 2, we went out to the garage and into the stairwell. We climbed what seemed like a long way up before we got to a door, and the door was labeled level 4.
 
Okay..
 
Did we miss level 3? No. There is no door at level 3.
 
So being on level 4 we went out and asked a police officer how to get to level 3. He laughed.
 
We had to go across the lanes and then over to that bridge, go across the bridge and turn right, there's an elevator right there that will take us down to level 3. Great!
 
Only problem is that we are now at the far south end of the garage, letter R, meaning I will once again traverse the entire garage to get to the car.
 
Well guess what?
 
We rode down to level 3, got off the elevator, and it didn't take long to discover that there was no way to move from something like section N any further toward section A. There is a huge gap in the structure.
 
That Seinfeld episode when they couldn't find Kramer's car in the Jersey mall parking garage was replaying in my mind.
 
Finally, we went up to level 4, traversed over to section B, found a stairwell, and went down to our car on level 3.
 
Here's the moral of the story:  Always check out Yelp! before parking in an airport parking garage. Here is an excerpt from Nick V.'s review of the Garage parking at Denver:  
 
"Do NOT Park on level #3. The elevators do not connect to that floor except for a couple on the far ends. Use level 3 as a last resort only."
 
 So now you know..