I just got back from one of America's great travel cities.

A travel city — I came up with the designation on the flight out — is a city that, through either setting or contents (ideally, a combination of the two), evokes a spirit of travel. And by this I don't mean a city that inspires people to visit it; that is a travel destination, and we have plenty of those. I mean a city that possesses numerous elements that speak, for tourists and residents alike, to a universal idea of travel.

In this country, I can think of only four such cities. New York, obviously, with its docks, ferries, tugboats, bridges. The island of Manhattan actually resembles a great ocean liner — the Empire State Building its smoke-free funnel — filled with millionaires and immigrants, its bow pointed toward the sea.

San Francisco qualifies. You cannot look at the Golden Gate Bridge without wanting to sail underneath it. In town, not just the cable cars but the old-fashioned street cars rumbling along Market Street (rehabilitated relics from non-travel cities) give an everyday feeling of ageless transport.

Miami is perhaps our most dazzling travel city. On weekends it's not impossible to gaze down from the top of the MacArthur Causeway on a row of brilliant white cruise ships and then look up to see a blimp. I once stood on the top deck of the Norway and watched as my wife's Lufthansa plane flew overhead. The Freedom Tower, not completely hidden by a rotund arena, is a workingman's Statue of Liberty, and even the new Carnival Center has something of the look of a lopsided liner. A city of water and light, Miami sparkles with movement and reflection.

But it's not where I just was. I was in our only inland travel city: Denver.

Snow-capped mountains that bring to mind sails — at least when replicated in an airport terminal — do not a travel city make. We have a few metropolises backed by white peaks (and/or served by funky airports).

But they don't have a turn-of-the-century Union Station. And if they do, it is not in the heart of a wine-barred downtown where, at night, its red-neon injunction — Travel by Train — fills the grazing masses with ideas. Inside the Beaux Arts building, facing the rows of high-backed benches, a schedule board still carries the moving words California Zephyr.

A few steps up 17th Street stands the Oxford Hotel, with its Cruise Room left of the lobby. Modeled after a lounge on the Queen Mary (and opened the day after Prohibition was repealed), it is an improbable Art Deco shrine with decorative panels and a chapel ceiling. Even before you drink your first martini, you can almost feel the windowless, pink-lit room sway.

The Molly Brown House Museum, a few blocks from the capitol, commemorates the woman who not only survived the Titanic but wrote travel articles for the Denver Times.

Need more? Try this: Cross the South Platte River and enter My Brother's Bar at 15th and Platte. Walk through the gloom past the necktied bartenders — sniffing the burgers, catching the strains of Vivaldi — and enter the commodious phone booth in the back. There hangs a poster of the famous buddies-in-arms photo of Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac. Embedded in the bottom is a framed letter written by Cassady. It is a request to a friend to stop by the bar and repay a debt. But, this being Cassady — a Denver boy with a penchant for stealing cars — it also mentions the Harvard Classics, "the 5-foot shelf of books" that the reformatory owned. "I've read," Cassady boasts to his friend, "about 2 feet of it."

Denver was the origin of a number of the trips in "On the Road," and the city the Beats frequently returned to. It all comes back as you walk down Larimer Street.