Labor Day Weekend 2013

Almost impulsively, we decided to take one last mini-trip before Molly started school...conveniently, her school starts the Tuesday after the Labor Day Weekend. We have been wanting to head down to Colorado Springs all summer to hit a few of the touristy things there we haven’t had a chance to get to. Taking advantage of thousands of Holiday Inn points earned while working in England, we got a free night at a nice hotel in the Springs area. Plan is an easy trip down Saturday morning to the Colorado Springs Zoo, easy night, enjoy a hotel, spend Sunday finding other adventures and then heads home that night, leaving us Monday for parades and relaxing before the real routine starts.

Saturday morning we got out of the house about an hour later than planned (thanks mostly in part to an extended White Trash Friday [aka: neighborhood gathering on the driveway for some beers]) and headed directly to the Zoo. Now let me tell you, we have been Denver Zoo members for a few years now and have visited several other zoos on our travels, but the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in the Springs is really something special. It is built on the side of a mountain right above the Broadmoor Hotel (swanky 5-star joint) and has more interesting animals and more hands on experiences than any place we have been. You can feed the giraffes, run with Wallabies, feed and hold a million exotic birds, ride ponies, sit in a lab for a while with a zoologist, and fully immerse yourself in the environment these animals live in. It is a beautiful zoo with great attention to detail. The reptile exhibit is actually more like a modern art museum with beautiful sculptures and paintings and other displays, except it has scary snakes and other exotic reptiles in each piece. There is a chair lift that takes you on an ariel tour of the whole zoo and the food, while still expensive, is quite good. We had a great time even though it rained on us in the afternoon. In-fact, that made it all the better. It started raining just after we got off the chair lift (and they shut it down), so we took that opportunity to drive up the Will Rogers Monument above the zoo (included in admission) and enjoy the view. After we returned, everyone was gone and we did the whole zoo again! It was great.

After shutting down the zoo, we headed to our hotel (much to our kids great excitement). Great place, decent food, a pool to play in (to make sure the kids were wiped out), and very comfortable night sleep. Next day, after our experience with the afternoon showers, we decided to drive up to the top of Pikes Peak first thing. Oh boy, this turned out to be a lesson in Colorado Meteorology. It is a 19 mile drive up to the 14K foot peak. It started very warm and pretty, even though we could see the mountain peak was in the clouds (the kids were pumped about “touching a cloud”). We got in a couple of early ‘hikes’ before things got interesting. As we crossed Timberline (11k feet), we entered the clouds. A little wet and foggy to start, then a little rainy, then a bit of hail, then a lot of hail, then full on white out conditions with slipping cars on precarious hair-pin turns and 3” of hail on the ground finally leading to the road closing leaving us stuck at the top of the world...awesome. It was intense. We were stuck in the car for almost half hour before getting into the mountain top gift shop/cafe because of the hail. I attempted to get out before that, but it felt like getting pelted with pea-gravel being shot out of a million sling shots. After a quick break in the weather, we bolted for the building ignoring the guy with the loud-speaker saying our lives were in danger being out there. For the next hour we were stuck in this place with a bunch of cranky folks with no place to sit and some bad food to shove down our throats. When we finally did get seated, word came that the road is open and the Rangers wanted us to head down immediately following a snow plow before the weather came back. Another mad rush to the car and we were ready to go....but wait! It is nice now. We have been up here for almost 2 hours and we haven’t seen the view. The clouds broke enough for a few pictures and then we bolted. But there was no big hurry, the roads were clear, the storm moved on (moved down to be specific...remember that fact as it will be important for our next adventure), and cars were heading back up. We stopped a couple of more times to take in the AMAZING vistas and headed to our next (and last) stop, the Cave of the Winds.

Driving down was mostly uneventful until we caught up with the aforementioned storm. It started raining hard and it didn’t let up for the next 4 hours. We headed just down the road to Manitou Springs and the Caves. Pretty awesome tourist trap. There were A LOT of people there (oh yeah, Labor Day Weekend) and our tour didn’t start for another hour and a half. The Cave of the Winds buildings stands on the edge of a canyon. The rain was pouring and the thunder and lightening was putting on quite a show (and scaring the pants off the non-Coloradan tourists). The kids did a fun “spelunking” simulator and all of us played a big arcade game you actual have to walk into. Oh yeah, then the cave tour. Very cool of course. Lots of stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, ribbon stalactites, columns, coral stone, etc.. The kids loved it, even though they were awfully tired and hungry. Got done with that, got ourselves through the rain and into the car and headed for dinner. Ate, PJ’d the kids, put in a movie and drove home late. Very fun.

Monday was the annual Louisville 2 hour Labor Day Parade and the rest of the time spent trying to keep the over tired kids intact (and keeping us sane).

We had a fun weekend. Here are some pictures (click here).

A Selfie at the Will Roger memorial monument on top of the Colorado Springs Zoo.