Mer ended up talking with a woman at the wedding on Sunday about the area, and they got to talking about Mer’s plans to go to the Garden of the Gods park. The woman was very enthusiastic, but warned Mer that “it’s not very big – it won’t take you too long to see it.” On Monday we spent six hours there.

The Garden of the Gods is a park full of dramatic and unusual red rock formations. According to the park, the name came from two surveyors who came across the formations in 1859, and one proclaimed, “This would be a great place for a beer garden.” (Hold your judgement.) His companion replied something to the effect of, “It would make a great garden of the gods!” When the park was donated to the city by the landowners around 1900, it was on the condition that the park be free and be called “The Garden of the Gods.” And so it is.

As you could guess, on a beautiful holiday Monday, the park was mobbed. We parked at the visitors’ center, and the woman at the info desk recommended walking into the park from the center, a walk of about fifteen minutes. Since the road to the small parking lots of the park was backed up at least that much, it was an easy decision. We walked in.

Which is the best way to go anyway. It allows the park slowly to reveal itself. The main features of the park are three huge rock monoliths, and as you walk in and around them, the features change. That is true for walking close up and getting far away. They are fascinating regardless of where you see them.

We wandered in and around the large stones, covering all the paths we saw on our map. By the time we had finished with the main northern area, I was out of water and getting hungry, so we walked part-way back and happened to catch the shuttle bus back to the visitors’ center, where we ate and filled our water bottles.

We wanted to see the southern end of the park, which has more, if smaller, stone features, but I didn’t want to walk the almost two miles there to start the hiking. I decided to risk moving the car. The southern end has several small parking lots and is far away from the visitors’ center and large crowd-drawing formations, so I banked on being able to find a parking spot. I was right, but there were only a couple of open spots. Nonetheless, it worked, and we started hiking the southern end of things. We saw a huge balanced rock and the companion rock that looks like a steamboat. We swung by an enormous trading post to use the bathroom and then got out of there. We hiked up to two towers of rock joined together with a window in the rock that looks over to Pikes Peak. And we got all the way up to a stone tower that looks like a Scotsman standing there, complete with a tam (the beret thingy).

All in all, our “not much to see” tour of the Garden of the Gods took ten miles of hiking and six hours of time (including lunch). It’s a magnificent place to wander.

From there, we made a quick refueling stop at the hotel room and then went back north to the Air Force Academy. Mer wanted to see more of the campus, and we both wanted to see their free student production of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. We saw a B-52 memorial with a retired B-52, the Academy cemetery (which will take any member from any of the military academies), overlooks for the campus and sports fields, and the outsides of a couple of buildings. By then it was time for the musical.

The students did a great job. There were about thirty actors on stage for the production. One thing that surprised me was they used a recorded score for the music. Military academies have a long history of great musicians, so that was a bit strange. Maybe the end of the year is too busy for the bands and musicians on campus.

The three leads (the protagonist, the lead woman, and the antagonist) were all superb. They were a joy to watch. I wasn’t familiar with the story or music from the play, so that was fun for me to discover. It is a play poking fun at big businesses, and also how women were treated in 1960s business culture, and it worked in that way. We enjoyed ourselves, even if the play was three hours long, including a ten-minute intermission. And if you’re wondering if a military academy play starts on time (most theater productions start five to ten minutes late), let me advise you to be prompt.

 

Today (Tuesday) was “my” day, and so I drove us about an hour east of Colorado Springs to the small town of Calhan. Or, to be more specific, down a dirt road a fair bit outside of the small town of Calhan, to a parking lot in the middle of a high plains scrub-grass prairie. Mer said she trusted me, but wasn’t sure why we were there. We hiked up a small rise and got a glimpse of some white bare rock formations. Down the hill and along the path further, we started to see some colors in the rock. I had brought her to see the Paint Mines Interpretive Park.

The Paint Mines is an area where rock covered up variously colored clays, producing these colorful and fantastically shaped columns and mounds. They are very fragile since they are largely made of clay and soft stones, but there are paths back in among the shapes and miniature canyons. We walked along most of the trails that wound through the “mines” and spent a good two hours there.

The “mines” are more like open pits. Native Americans used the clays for pigments, and as recently as the early 1900s, the area was used to mine colors for bricks. What remains doesn’t look like a mine or a pit, and the colors and whites are vivid. We had a blast.

Back to the hotel room for more water. I have found the mile-high air to be very dry and drink about twice as much as I normally do. From the hotel, we went back to the cute “crunchy” neighborhood we had been in on Sunday morning, to go to the Michael Garman Museum and Gallery.

Michael Garman was a sculptor of 1/6-scale miniatures of people and urban settings. He passed away in 2021. I expected a few large doll-house sorts of things, but I was happily very wrong. Garman’s work was exceptionally detailed, with peeling wallpapers in rooms and trash in trash cans and individual bottles in bars. He loved using mirrors to create depth and even used them to change scenes in rooms, so that if you looked in a window of a building, you would see one room, and then a light would come on nearby and a different room would replace it. He used angled glass to project holograms of people into rooms and alleys, and his attention to detail even went as far as having Casablanca showing in the town’s movie theater (visible if you looked in through the door). We were overwhelmed by the museum and went through it three times (it’s not terribly big). We also had fun with provided scavenger hunts that asked us to look for very specific details in the town, like looking for one sports pennant or for the location of one birdcage.

By the time we got done with the museum, it was too late for me to stick to my plan to go back to the WW II aircraft museum, so I changed my plan and went to the nearby Red Rock Canyon Open Space (a large park inside the city limits). This park has rock formations like those in the Garden of the Gods, but on a smaller scale and with very few crowds on a work day. Sadly, we only got to hike there for about twenty minutes before a storm threatened, so we went back to the cute neighborhood for supper, hoping the park area would clear up. It didn’t, and so we called it a night after walking around a few blocks looking at the shops in the area. I would have loved to hike in the park more, but it seemed wise to play things safe to keep us from encountering lightning and possibly getting soaked. The area around our hotel (the north side of town) was fine – the storms seemed to be coming through in a narrow band.

And so ends a good, if short, trip to Colorado. Tomorrow we fly home, and since it took us three and a half hours to get here on Saturday, we’re going to leave about four hours before we have to get the to airport since we don’t know what morning rush hour looks like. It will be good to get home and see family, friends, and felines.

Meredith had a student, Hope, who was an excellent writer in Mer’s classes, and Hope went on to become an author and to work in the publishing industry. Mer and Hope have stayed in touch over the ten years or so since Hope graduated, and so it was that several months ago we were delighted to receive an invitation to Hope’s wedding. Even though Hope lives in Ohio, she decided to have a destination wedding in Colorado Springs. The wedding would have been a delightful priority for us no matter what, but to have it held in a pretty place in a state neither of us had been to made it an event indeed.

We flew in on Saturday, and after three and a half hours of getting through the airport, getting to the car rental place, getting our car, getting our second car after the rearview mirror fell off in my hands, and then navigating through a surprisingly heavily trafficked highway, we got to Colorado Springs, which is supposed to be an eighty-minute drive away. We drove straight to our 1:30 docent-led tour of the National Museum of World War II Aviation, getting there at 1:31. I ended up missing the intro movie as I used the bathroom, but otherwise, we made the entire three-hour tour.

It was excellent. Our docent was a retired Coast Guard pilot who was qualified to fly anything the service had (single engine, multi engine, prop, jet, helicopter), and he was highly interactive and personable. He asked our group lots of questions to have us give many wrong answers, and he then explained the what and the why. The planes were magnificent, and there were probably two dozen planes in the hangar, all of which can still fly. He took us around and highlighted about eight different aircraft, and then took us over to the hangar where people restore aircraft and talked about that process. Almost everyone at the museum is a volunteer (they have two paid positions), and it seemed as if that included the restorers (it was a little murky in that the restorer hangar was run by a separate non-profit that was closely associated with the museum). We finished the tour in another hangar, in which the museum still has a functioning mechanical flight simulator from the 1930s, which was a mechanical marvel to see in action. The man demonstrating it put the “plane” into a spinning stall and recovered from it, all while being enclosed and having to rely on instruments and feel.

There was a more modern simulator we could use, but by then I was feeling pretty poorly from lack of sleep, water, and food, so sadly, I passed that up and went to the car to eat a granola bar and drink the rest of my water, and then we headed out for the hotel so I could eat and rest before evening plans. A few quick things learned from the museum:

• One of the major advances in planes was the variable-pitch propeller. That acted as a gear box for the plane, which allowed for both power and speed options. It took until the 1930s for engineers to figure out how to build that system.
• Aluminum was precious and expensive during the war years, so many planes were covered in sail cloth, which was stretched and sealed.
• Aquatic airplanes needed to  have small steps in the hull to cause bubbles, which broke up water tension, which would have held the plane to the water.
• Navy aircraft had foldable wings that were held in place by just one or two bolts depending on model.

Mer had evening plans, so after my hour nap, we drove a short distance up the road to Cosmo’s Magic Theater, which, as you may have surmised, is a theater for magic. Cosmo had a long career of touring the US, but he wanted to stop being on the road, so he built this small theater that seats about fifty people. He and other guest magicians perform magic tricks in the intimate space, which allows for lots of interaction, at which Cosmo was very good. He bantered with us, telling stories of how he learned magic (from the age of five) and having audience members help him with tricks. Cosmo even came out to the lobby before the show, during intermission, and after the show to chat with his audience. Mer and I got to talk with him and his wife for about five minutes after the show. It was a lovely evening, and the magic was top-notch. I only had vague guesses on how things actually worked on maybe ten percent of the illusions. We followed the show up with ice cream in a cute downtown part of Colorado Springs.

On Sunday, the wedding wasn’t until 3:00, so we had the morning to explore. We went out to a small mom-and-pop breakfast restaurant in a very crunchy-seeming neighborhood (“Tie dye grand opening!”) that was also having a street festival. The food was very good, and I had a slight view of the mountains from the front deck area.

Mer then had us head north a few miles to the Air Force Academy. It’s a dramatically set campus, sitting right in front of mountains. The working area of the campus is small, but the area for the grounds is something like ten miles long and four miles wide. We got out at the visitors’ center and explored it efficiently since we didn’t have a ton of time. We did take the time to watch the “a year in the life of a new cadet” film, and we both decided it was something for which we wouldn’t have been cut out. I don’t particularly like being yelled at. We browsed the rest of the center, where I learned that all cadets are required to be involved in sports of some kind, either intermural or intramural.

We spent the rest of our time wandering the campus. Sadly, the rather iconic chapel is being renovated until 2027 and is fully hidden under a huge box. But we walked up an adjacent hill that had a path put in that led to small areas to sit for prayer and contemplation and gave great views of the surrounding area. We explored a courtyard full of large monuments to WW II aircraft and the people who served on them, and we poked around one open building where we discovered not only that the cadets had a theater society, but that they were putting on a free show of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. It was hard to think of these hard-nosed military people singing and dancing around, but there I am stereotyping.

We headed home to the hotel to get ready for the wedding, which was only a few minutes away at a lovely facility that looked out over the mountains. We pulled in just as a car with a couple of former CVCA students pulled in, which was fun. We spent most of the evening chatting with them, especially since they were seated at our table. The ceremony was simple but formal, being an Anglican service of marriage. The reception afterwards was great, with good dinner music (mostly swing and related music), and Mer and I danced a fair amount. Anytime we needed a break, we went out on the veranda to look at the mountains.  The wedding wrapped up about 8:30, and we went back to the hotel, where I went to bed as quickly as I could. Mer still had Monday plans, so I needed my rest.