Colorado Springs, CO

18-JUN-2004
Today we drove across Kansas and into Colorado. Ate lunch enroute, and stopped at a grocery store and got chicken for dinner. Drove quite a few miles today – 659 miles, the longest we drove so far on this trip in one day. Stopped at Fountain, CO to sleep around 2200. – posted by Roger

19-JUN-2004
We drove to Rocky Mountain Mennonite Camp and Travis met friends from home and Goshen. He spent some of the afternoon and the evening with them. In the afternoon I went to town and had the front end aligned on the pickup. It seemed to be pulling extra hard to the right, but the alignment was OK. They advised me to rotate the tires, since they thought the one front tire may be causing it. – posted by Roger

20-JUN-2004
It was 36 degrees this morning. Nicole said it was 32 degrees during the night. We got up and went to church at Beth EL in Colorado Springs. The yellow pages said it started at 10:30AM, but they changed their schedule over the summer and we only go there after the sermon was over. After church we went to the US Olympic Training Center, which was a bit boring. They give tours every day except Sunday, so we couldn’t get into a lot of buildings. We also went to the Garden of the Gods and spent some time there. On the way back we decided to check out Cripple Creek, CO. We also went to Victor and Goldfield, CO and were amazed at the amount of old gold mine shafts around. We went to a few of them and explored a bit which was fun. Many abandoned shafts. We also went up to a high overlook on a huge existing strip mine, and saw the mining operation in progress. It was interesting – we looked down on a huge strip mine operation with many, many HUGE trucks etc hauling dirt. – posted by Roger

21-JUN-2004
Today we got up and went to Pike’s Peak, but the weather was not very cooperative. We got to the gate about 8:00AM, but it was very clouded over. It opened at 7:00 and the weather did not look very promising. The man at the gate was very nice, and gave us a break (about ½ price) because of the uncertainty of the weather. On the way up we were in and out of the clouds some, but at the top we couldn’t see much. Sometimes there were brief periods where one could see part of the way down, but not much. It was below freezing and very windy. We got to throw a few snowballs at each other. Jolene and Renae were feeling pretty sick, so we decided to return. Nicole’s eyes were watery also, which was funny – didn’t know high altitude did that. Travis and I took a little run, but got winded pretty quickly. The altitude was 14110 feet. A thunder storm went through, and the ground got covered with sleet and hail, which was interesting. It kept sleeting and raining, and the ground got about 2 inches of sleet – the ground was all white – the whole time it kept thundering and lightening. It was like crazy winter weather on the first day of summer. The altitude of our campground was 9620 feet. We had a difficult time getting the camper out of the campground – it was VERY tight and we worked a while to get out of there. Then we showered and headed for Denver and the Flying J. On the way past we stopped and visited the Air Force Academy, but got there just a bit before it closed. We wanted to see the movie, but only saw the last few minutes. At the Flying J we did all the laundry (quite a few loads), and spent time getting caught up on internet work. – posted by Roger