Getting around, part two

I must start with a couple of corrections. I’m not going to edit the previous entry; I’m going to let it stand as a monument to the confusion that is Getting Around in Denver.
First: I realized when I turned toward I-25 this morning that I do not, in fact, live east of the highway. I live west. If I get off the highway and go toward the house, I see mountains. That’s west. And therein lies the rub with “directional” directions: People sometimes screw them up. Once I was half an hour late to an appointment when someone gave me directions coming from the east, and I was coming from the west (“Well, I’m coming from downtown,” I had said, “so which way is that?”).
Second: I made mention of 1st Street, when what I meant to say was 1st Avenue. All the numbered streets are Avenues*. In Denver, there is a difference. I’m not even sure if there is a 1st Street, but if there is, it’s a completely different slab of pavement than the one I was talking about.
* See, 1st Street would be in LoDo. If you’ve heard of a Denver neighborhood, LoDo’s probably it (thanks ever so to “The Real World”). Once it was a warehouse district filled with ne’er-do-wells; now LoDo is cleaned up, a twentysomething’s paradise of cocktail bars and overpriced restaurants. My husband used to work in LoDo, and it is still the only part of the city where I absolutely require my breadcrumb trails still.
LoDo was the original city center, which was oriented along the South Platte River, which runs northeast to southwest. If you look at a map of Denver, you’ll see what looks like a jaunty beret of streets sitting cocked on the northwest corner of the city’s otherwise blocky self. That’s LoDo. The cross-streets, which are numbered Streets, are completely different from their Avenue counterparts. And as you approach LoDo, all the normal roads you know and love end, and if you get in the wrong lane, you end up on the wrong road.
Somehow, in LoDo, my sense of direction flies completely out the window. I’ll be convinced I should turn right, when, as it happens, I should have turned left. There must be a memorial doughnut-shaped path worn in LoDo that’s named after me. And so I really have no advice about how to get around there (and we won’t even discuss parking), but I’m happy to accept any offered.