June 28th - Colorado Springs, Colorado

Altho the AVA Convention business sessions were over, two walks were scheduled for Saturday and one for Sunday morning. The times for starting the Saturday morning walk were from 7-11, which gave us enough time to cook a breakfast and pack up everything before we drove down the mountain to Colorado Springs. Packing took more time than usual because I had double and triple-staked our tent to withstand the storms, and getting all those stakes out took a while. For some reason I also had trouble packing the clamshell—the hinge sprang loose again due to all the shoving and I had to take time out to get out the pliers and bend it back into shape before I could finish the packing. Everything also seemed to take just that much more effort and make me just that much more tired at the 9,600 feet altitude, so maybe we hadn’t completely adjusted to the altitude even at this late date.

But we finally crammed it all in and drove down the mountain one last time to Colorado Springs. The weather was still cooperating with bright blue skies—not a cloud in sight. Our morning walk started at Memorial Park and curled around past a veladrome where Olympic bicyclists were training on those peculiar racing bikes. Then we headed west into the downtown area—we found the downtown surprisingly large, quite clean, and it appeared quite prosperous. The checkpoint was at the Pioneer Museum, which was a very nice old building, and I wish we had been able to take a look inside because it certainly looked interesting from the outside.

We proceeded down a main street and chanced on a small bakery that offered free samples—I chose ¼ of a quite large cookie (think Mrs. Fields size) and Monika chose a slide of tomato and herb bread. The free samples didn’t last long, but we also bought big round cinnamon twist kind of pastry that we continued to munch on as we walked along—we certainly do not suffer on our walks! The return route had a checkpoint at the U.S. Olympic Training Center Visitor’s Center, which is quite a place. The interior was very fancy and outside we found a lot of sculptures and silhouettes that represented pretty much every conceivable Olympic sport.

We were getting pretty tired by this time and it was becoming hot, but we took a quick turn around the “Hall of Fame”, a rotunda with pictures of current Olympians. From what I could see, all the featured Olympians were also members of the U.S. armed forces who I would imagine spent most of their duty time training for the games. This doesn’t quite strike me as the kind of amateur that DeCorbet had in mind when he revived the Olympic games at the turn of the century, but that might just be the curmudgeon in me coming out. Anyway, we walked back to Memorial Park to finish the walk and, after a quick stop for lunch, drove south to find a hotel for the night in Trinidad, Colorado.

After checking in and taking a much-needed shower, we fell into bed for a two-hour nap, after which we decided we could still drive back north 60 miles for the evening walk in Colorado City. When we originally signed up we had thought that Colorado City was basically the same as Colorado Springs, but in fact Colorado City is a small town about 70 miles south of Colorado Springs on I-25. That was probably not a rational decision, as we had to drive an hour back north, walk for over an hour, and then drive an hour back south to our hotel room. We justified this decision on the basis that we had already paid for the walk and we wouldn’t get the award unless we went back up there and walked it, but like I say I don’t think this was too rational.

The decision started to look even less rational as we headed north and saw a huge, black thunderstorm hovering over the Colorado City area. We got to the starting point and hightailed it out of there as best we could with already having walked 10 kilometers in the heat; all we could manage was something like a fast shuffle. Fortunately the huge black cloud blocked out the sun and cooled it down by the time we left about 6:45 p.m., and that helped refresh us. The short 5 km loop of this walk, which is all we were attempting, led us around a scenic lake just outside the town proper. We had nice views of the lake framed by mountains in the back, the oncoming storm crossing those selfsame mountains, and the sun occasionally peeking thru underneath the storm clouds as we hustled (slowly) around the path surrounding the lake.

We saw lightning and heard thunder as we walked back down the hill to the finish point. The lightning hit to our left and to our right, and we kept busy counting the seconds between the lightning flash and the sound of the thunder—each five seconds means the lightning strike is about 1mile away. We were relieved to find out that the lightning strikes were 2 miles away at first, but then they started to get closer and we walked as fast as our tired legs would carry us back to the finish point. It had spitted rain at us during the last stretch, and just as we closed the doors on the truck it started to come down in earnest. Safe, dry, and cozy, we could relax with a nice, leisurely drive back through the setting sun to our hotel room in Trinidad and fall into bed, completely exhausted.