= Stupid O'Clock =

The day began at the ridiculous hour of 5 o'clock. Never get up before the sun on a summer morning, that's what I always say. But we did. Dave, Leen, and I piled into the rental car and headed south. We still had the cooler with us, which still had ice and a few drinks in it. I don't remember specifically, but Leen probably had a Mountain Dew. We were all at least sipping water, though, in preparation for the high altitudes to come. We were headed for Pike's Peak,

En route, Dave read my print-out of the Stupid Emails he missed from the previous day. Now he knows all about JIGGLE JIGGLE. Hey, do you want to hear a great joke? One time I rented the movie TRAFFIC, but when I went home, I got stuck in TRAFFIC, so I couldn't watch the movie TRAFFIC.

On the way, we drove through a town called Castle Rock. It's called Castle Rock, because up on a hill, there's a big rock that looks like a castle on top of a hill. Naturally, it was cool. Even that early in the morning.

By the time we pulled into the station for the cog railway, at a place called Manitou Springs, the sun had risen. Not many people were about yet, though, because it was still crazy early. We had overestimated the drive to Colorado Springs, largely due to the negligible traffic at that hour. So we had a bit of a wait. We piled on sweatshirts and passed around water bottles leftover from Sunday and filed into the station. Dave's periodic refrain of the morning was, "Sooo tired." We were all pretty much just standing around looking like zombies, but we got over it once things started happening.

A gift shop was nearby, so Leen and I decided it was as good a time as any to pick up some souvenir T-shirts and stuff, so we did. I ran them back to the car. Dave bought a souvenir jacket, because he was cold.

Also while we were waiting, Leen caught sight of a couple of hummingbird feeders nearby that had hummingbirds *swarming* around it. We have hummingbirds in New England, but only one type, and I don't know that I've seen that many at one time. There were at least a dozen, perhaps more. Leen snapped some pictures.

Finally, the train arrived, and the call to board sounded out over the loudspeaker.

= The Ascent =

The seats in the rail car were wooden, three seats to a row on one side, and two seats on the other. The rows faced alternate directions -- the downhill-facing seats angled back a bit more so you're not sliding forward all the time -- so some people were facing forward, and others were facing backward. If you kept your seat, you'd be facing forward in one direction and backward in the other. But that trip -- the first train of the day on a weekday -- had plenty of empty spaces, some once we had all claimed our assigned seats, we could spread out and sit wherever we wanted. The people across from us vacated to a spot further back so they could sit forward. I crossed over to their seats so all three of us could spread out.

And the ascent began, winding up the slopes of softwoods and cinnamon-colored aspens. In a clearing to one side, I spotted a deer. A guide pointed out the sights along the way ("On the two-seat side, there is a rock that's shaped like a diamond. We like to call it, Diamond Rock.") and told us a bit about the railway itself. I didn't know this, but apparently there are only two cog railways in the country. As soon as she said that, of course we knew what the other one was before she said so: the one that goes up Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Yay for New Hampshire. The Pike's Peak cog is the highest in the world, but Mount Washington's is the oldest in the world. (Manitou Springs, at the bottom of the Pike's Peak cog, rests at a higher elevation than the top of Mount Washington!)

It figures, of course: I've never been up the Mount Washington cog, because, hey, I can do that anytime. I've heard of a lot of people who live near Orlando and have never been to DisneyWorld for the same reason.

It got cooler as we ascended, most notably in the appropriately named Icebox Canyon, which is a canyon angled such that the sun can't get in there very well. The temperature difference is steep and sudden, but once you pull out of it, it warms up again.

The guide told us that the train was ascending the slope at about 10 mph. On our return, we would be travelling at 130 mph.

Once we got high enough that we could see the views, we stopped worrying about the mild fog and thick cloud cover we'd been seeing all morning. I figured it would burn off once the sun got at it, but that's not what happened: instead, in the first mere moments of the ascent, we rose above it all. The view from the railway car was indescribable in its beauty: basically it looked like we were on a vast range of coastal mountains, and a turbulent ocean had frozen over and become snow. There was no sign of the town beneath, but otherwise visibility was great.

Once above the treeline, the ground becomes these vast green, rock-littered fields that sweep away on both sides. Parts are very steep, but most of it isn't: it's just a big huge honkin' hunk of a mountain. The vegetation that grows up there is this super short, tough stuff. It apparently only spreads an inch or two every hundred years, so an old dirt road which had fallen into disuse decades ago was still clearly visible.

Scattered over the fields were lichen-covered rocks and boulders (pink/orange granite), and inhabiting those were yellow-bellied marmots. We saw several, most of them right alongside the train tracks.

= The Top =

When we reached the top, it was surprisingly warmer than we were expecting -- not much colder than at the bottom, in fact, and substantially warmer than Icebox Canyon -- and we didn't feel lightheaded or anything. We felt just fine!

Until we moved. I had been prepared for that, hearing the stories about elevation sickness and accustomed to living at about 20 feet above sea level. You feel fine until you stand up and walk, and then it hits you.

But I wasn't prepared for *how* it hits you. I always thought you just got tired and out of breath after hardly doing anything. Kind of, but you also feel dizzy. It felt kind of like I just stepped off a merry-go-round, and my equilibrium hadn't stabilized yet.

We walked inside the little building at the top, where there was a gift shop at one end and a cafeteria on the other. It was SO COOL. I'd walk slowly around and not be able to balance well. Dave, used to substantially higher elevations than I am, was tripping out as well. I can't tell you how exciting it was to experience elevation sickness firsthand. Dave had fun, too. He kept going, "WHEEEEE!" because it does sort of feel like you're on a ride.

Once we stumbled through the cafeteria line and sat down and ate breakfast (Dave, Leen, and I had a cheeseburger, beef stew in a breadbowl, and a barbecue pork sandwich, respectively -- well hey, it *felt* like lunchtime, as we'd been up for 4 1/2 hours already), the dizziness mostly went away, and we felt good enough to go outside and walk around and take in the view.

Of course, once we actually *got up* and walked around, we got all tired and winded again. But at least the dizziness had gone away.

We snapped pictures at the summit sign and elsewhere on the viewing platforms. Naturally, we had to wander over to the *actual* submit, a pile of rocks back behind the building, and stand on the highest one. You can't go up a mountain and then never set foot on the actual top. I can't, anyway.

Meanwhile, we chowed down on doughnuts. Dave had been anticipating this on the way. For some reason, the thing to do at the top of the mountain is eat the homemade doughnuts they got up there in the cafeteria. I can see why. They were really good, and it's the distinctive kind of food offering that will be memorable.

It was very pleasant up there, at 14,110 feet above sea level. The temperature was 44 degrees but felt a bit warmer, as a dry cold isn't penetrating like a damp cold is. It goes without saying that the views were spectacular in all directions, all the more so because it was a kind of landscape Leen and I aren't used to seeing.

As we discovered, it was a really good thing to have come up so early. Nobody was at the top when we arrived, and our train wasn't that full, so the top was pretty free of other people. When we passed the second trainload on the way down, they looked a whole lot more crowded.

= The Descent =

On the way down, we took in our final views of marmots, cloud-cover, and those cinnamon-colored aspens. The remaining doughnuts were polished off. We picked up a souvenir photo booklet for two dollars -- rash spending, I know.

The tour guide was mostly quiet, but she did tell us about the train's brake system, joking that the beginning of the descent is about when people become curious about that. So she told us about the brakes, and how, if they failed, there were emergency air brakes, and if *those* failed, there were two springs at the bottom to stop us -- Manitou Springs and Colorado Springs. Ba-dum-bum-TSHHH!

The weird thing about the descent, because I didn't notice this at all on the way up, is how the world looks slanted. Despite that the horizon is visible all around you, when you're grinding away down that slope, it feels shallower than it really is, which means the sprawling land before you feels like it's all an upward slope. The illusion held when you looked out the side windows, too. The horizon looks sloped. Trippy.

= The Arcade =

Once back at the bottom, we figured we'd poke around a bit in the tourist trap town of Manitou Springs. It's an interesting place -- in some senses, a typical "walk around the overpriced shops, assuming you can find a place to park, which you can't" type of touristy area, but it was all set in a town that looked like it was an old, quaint mountain village long before the arcades and roadside snack counters opened.

On a whim, we decided to wander through the arcades, which I think all belonged to the same one or two outfits but were sprawled out in several small pieces of different buildings, and you'd have to wander across sidewalks outside to get from piece to piece. There was a curious mix of old machines in with the new ones, including the really really old mechanical games, as well as things like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. Skeeball is the main attraction for Leen and me, so we burned a few quarters on that and then discovered that our two bucks was worth two pieces of gum. Ok, I know the ticket games in arcades are bad financial deals, but at any self-respecting arcade back home, a couple bucks will get you a handful of tootsie rolls, even if you're not that good.

Dave refused to play Dance Dance Revolution, even after I begged him to.

= Carl's Jr. =

For lunch, we tried to find a Carl's Jr. I hadn't had a Western Bacon Cheeseburger from Carl's Jr. since RinkUnion III in San Diego. Dave remembered there being one right off an exit somewhere in Castle Rock, so we figured we'd try to find that.

We kept an eye fastened on those blue Food signs that tell you what there is for food at the next exit. These signs sometimes commit crimes of omission, though, so we also looked for the actual buildings off each exit, too, which is possible due to the lack of trees obscuring the view.

We reached one exit that didn't show any signs of a Carl's Jr, but it looked familiar to Dave, so we took the exit anyway and looked around. Nope.

The exit after that looked like it might be it too, so we took that exit and poked around, but again turned up nothing.

Finally we were starting to wonder if we'd ever find the place, and when we reached the third exit, Leen asked if we should just give up looking, and I said, yeah, ok, skip it.

But Leen saw that there was an Arby's at that exit, so she took the exit anyway, and we pulled up to the red light at the top of the ramp.

Now, where's that Arby's? Hmmm.

Oh, hey. There's a Carl's Jr. RIGHT NEXT TO US.

So we went to Carl's Jr., and Dave and I picked up food. Nothing looked good to Leen, so we then swung through the Arby's drive-through.

Man, there's nothing like a good food.

= Butterflies =

Dave and BG had a prior engagement for that afternoon (which is why we took the early train up Pike's in the first place), so once we got home, Leen and I were on our own. Our plan was, if we had the energy, to go check out the Butterfly Pavilion, which is a neat place just down the road from where the RinkUnion hotel was.

Inexplicably, we had enough energy, so we headed out there to see what that was all about. It was great. As a warm-up, you can tour through a couple rooms where they have several different exotic species of insects and spiders and stuff in glass cases, specimens native to South America and Africa, for instance. A few were pretty nasty -- spiders, roaches, and a footlong millipede -- while others were just fascinating, like green insects shaped and textured like leaves, complete with the browned edges leaves get when they're dehydrated. Another case had giant green insects that must have been eight inches long and six inches wide. Just crazy. Meanwhile, on one end of one of the rooms, a guy was showing interested visitors a tarantula, which was crawling around on his arm. One young girl agreed to an offer, and he let the spider crawl onto her.

No thanks.

Finally we got the actual pavilion part, which is a humongous tent with a lot of exotic vegetation growing inside. It's kept steamy and warm for the butterflies. Paths wind through the plants, which are dense and tower overhead, and in the center is a small, very enclosed pond.

When you walk in, at first you don't really see anything but all the green, but it's a kind of blindness of the untrained eye -- you don't know what to look for. Then, suddenly, your eyes pick out a colorful spot on a leaf, and you realize there's a butterfly. Then you realize, duh, there are ten of them just on this one little expanse of ivy. And then you see them everywhere, fluttering back and forth across the paths, nestling in flowers, hanging from the undersides of leaves, and napping on top of them.

The colors were gorgeous, all different kinds but all bright somehow. Sometimes there would be one closed up, and then it would fly away and you'd realize the backs of the wings, which you couldn't see before, were some altogether different bright color. Some butterflies had elaborate patterns, rather than bright colors. Some were huge, and others were tiny. I don't know how many different species there were in there, but there were a lot, and I guess some come from some pretty exotic places. Leen snapped away at her camera and wound up with some pretty good shots. Some of them were just moving too fast to photograph well, but many were cooperative.

Check for hitchhikers before leaving the pavilion, the sign said. Nope, no butterflies tagging along with us. We exited the pavilion.

The gift shop -- all attractions end in a gift shop -- had some interesting things in it. Playing cards, of course, which I had to buy. But what caught my eye was an assortment of boxed snacks. "Sour cream and onion larvae," for example. ("Ingredients: larvae, corn syrup, onion powder...") Or, "Cheese crickets." It was pretty much what you'd think. A box of dried larvae, or crickets, with the kind of snack food powder on them you'd see on flavored potato chips. Next to these snacks were scorpion lollipops.

We didn't buy any.

= Caches and Kremes =

Back at Dave's. We still needed to get a Colorado geocache, and right then was as good a time as any. It's amazing how much you can fit into a single day when you start it at 5am. Leen had preloaded several geocaches into her GPS, but none were right around Dave's house. So she got online with Dave's laptop, found a couple of caches at a bus stop and nearby park, and we headed out again.

The most fascinating thing about geocaching is how they take you to all these places you never knew existed. Obviously Dave and BG knew of the bus stop right down the road from them, but they didn't know that along a path and over a hill is a park. Admittedly, not such a great park in this case, but as better example, a geocache took us to a *lake* in the very town we'd lived in for five years and never knew was there.

We looked for the cache at the bus stop first, getting within 20 feet of it before we even got out of the car. It turned out to be underneath a metal rim at the base of a streetlight -- one of the more interesting places we've seen one.

Anyway, that took care of the Colorado geocache requirement, but we figured we'd take a walk and try to find a second one, so we did. We had to walk underneath the highway (the cars sound cool when they zoom by just overhead), then along a paved path that runs parallel to the highway a short distance, underneath a perpendicular highway, then loops around a grassy rise and down into an area with some trees, a marshy pond, a stream, and lots of undergrowth. It took a bit of exploration to figure out what side of the marshy area to approach from, but we did. It took us down into a little nook, a surprisingly firm patch of ground right next to the marsh. It was closely enclosed by a few trees, and the cache was hidden behind one. Excellent.

Afterward, the next order of business was to find that Krispy Kreme that Leen had looked up online and knew was somewhere on 120th avenue. Dave and BG didn't know of one in the area, but Leen can find Krispy Kreme shops like she can find geocaches.

Krispy Kremes are mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. We picked up a dozen to share.

= City Buffet =

That evening, Dave took us to a place called City Buffet, but they call it something else. It advertises that it's American, Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese, but really it's Chinese food with french fries and bad pizza.

I only had three platefuls of food, and Leen thought that was a lot. Well, I had to try everything. Unfortunately, coming in as late as we did, a lot of the food was cold, but the chicken fingers and crab rangoon were warm, so that's what counts. Good assortment of desserts, too, although I miscalculated somewhere and was too full for ice cream.

After that, we went back to Dave's place for the fourth and final time that day. We talked a bit but crashed pretty hard from the long and active day.

Our plane was to leave the next day. All good things come to an end.