This has been another day of so much to do that I am glad that we are young and healthy. Today we headed south to Colorado Springs and the Garden of the Gods. We passed the Air Force Academy and watched planes towing gliders into the sky.
We had signed up for the Segway tours. We had done this once before in San Juan, Puerto Rico and it was so much fun that we decided to do it again.
They always have an orientation period but because most of us had ridden them before (one person even brought his own Segway) it was a fairly short orientation.
This tour was the long one at 2 hours and it sure beat walking, being in a car or on horseback. This was so much fun.
The rock formations were fascinating as we came over this rise.
While we were waiting to start this guy just sort of befriended us and was telling us about the park and the things to look for and soon we knew about his family and his favorite movies. He phoned his wife to get the name of the movie so that we could watch it. That was lots of fun. Then he took our picture in front of the figures of the kissing camels by the garden gates.
Then we headed over to see Pike's Peak, but decided to eat lunch in Manatou Springs at Adam's Mountain Cafe. It is a tree hugger restaraunt with lots of vegan and veggie dishes and not a steak or burger to be found. But the food, again, was excellent.
We did indeed make it to the top of Pike's Peak. And it was snowing lightly up there. The air is about 50% of the oxygen that is available at the base.
This is NOT the train that took us to the top. It was just a cool thing for taking pictures on. So I did.
This was the cool train station.
This train does not apply the drive power to the wheels but runs it through the cods in the center. A normal train can get traction through the wheels on the rails for a maximum of an 8% grade. A cog train like this one can travel grades up to 26%. The steepest grade that we traveled to Pike's Peak was 25%.
At the top of the peak was this plaque. It is about a woman, Kathrine Lee Bates, who, after traveling to the top of Pike's Peak and seeing the plains of Kansas to the east with their wheat fields and the mountains to the west, wrote the words to the song, "My Country 'Tis Of Thee".
This is the view to the west of the mountains. Pike's Peak is one of 54 peaks in Colorado that are over 14,000 feet high but what makes this one special is that it stands alone. The others are in mountain ranges. And it is on the eastern edge of the Rockies so that you can see the plains of Kansas from the top.
This is the view of the plains of Kansas to the east out in the distance with Colorado Springs near the base of the mountains.
The lady providing the information over the loud speakers as we rode the train up mentioned that we did not need to worry about the train failing and crashing because there were two springs at the bottom - Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs (gasp!)
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