Colorado vacation post #2

We arrived in Divide Thursday afternoon and quickly settled into the cabin. It was a bit smaller than I had anticipated but was still large enough to suit our needs. There was a grill there and I had planned on grilled brats for supper so I went to work on getting things ready. I knew it was a charcoal grill but I thought that one bag of charcoal was provided. I was wrong. I searched high and low but couldn't find one anywhere. Thankfully, the previous occupants had left some partially used coals in a bucket out on the porch. I scooped them out and started the grill with those. After supper, I removed all breakable items from Natalie's room and tucked the kids into bed. They were tired and definitely ready for bed.

On Friday, we did some sightseeing. First we went to the Royal Gorge. We were only going to go to one expensive attraction and we decided that the Royal Gorge would be it. At least with the admission price came all of the attractions within the park except for the bungee-jumping which we weren't interested in anyway. The first thing we did when we got to the park was to ride the incline railway. It takes you down to the bottom of the canyon and you can see the Arkansas River.

Here is Natalie in the incline railway car:
Here I am giving Dan a "look:"
Here we are at the bottom of the gorge:

After we were done with the railway we rode the tram across the gorge. It is basically a car that fits about 25 people and goes across the gorge kind of like a ski lift. They joked that it takes 5 minutes to cross the gorge but only 8 seconds to get to the bottom.

After the tram we walked through the wildlife area where they had buffalo and elk. Then we went over to the petting zoo and the burro rides. Darin and Natalie were the only ones who could ride the burros since there was a height limit.

Here we are in the middle of the walking/driving bridge that goes across the gorge. Kara was terrified to walk across it since the planks were made of wood and there were spaces between the planks.
After we were done at the Royal Gorge we drove into Colorado Springs for a late lunch. Then we drove to Pike's Peak. Believe it or not, there is a fee to drive to the top of Pike's Peak. So we paid and started on our way. The sign at the entrance said that you should have at least a half a tank of gas or enough to go 80 miles. Our gas tank said we had a little less than half but our estimated mileage to empty was 140 miles so Dan figured we were good. The girls were a bit less sure. But we started out anyway. The first half of the drive wasn't so bad. The curves were mild and the road wasn't too steep. When we got half way things started to get a little bit more interesting. There were several hairpin turns and the grade was much steeper. Plus, at many of the turns there are no guardrails--just the side of the mountain. Thankfully there wasn't much traffic because there is absolutely no way two vehicles could be in a turn at once--and we even have a really good turning radius with our van. There were several places where I was white-knuckled--Dan would be looking down the mountain (i.e. not paying attention to the road) and we'd be coming up on a hairpin turn. Thankfully on the way back down we were mostly on the inside of the road and I was able to better appreciate the views.

Here is a view from the top of Pike's Peak. On really clear days you are supposed to be able to see up to 4 states. It was partly cloudy the day we were there. When we started at the bottom of the mountain it was about 85 degrees. It was 53 at the top. Thankfully we had remembered to bring sweatshirts along.

Here is a pic I took out the window on our way down. It had begun to get a bit cloudy and the sun was streaking through the clouds. The sun reflected on a lake far away and it was a really cool thing to see. Unfortunately this picture doesn't do the scene any justice.
Remember when I said Dan thought we had enough gas even though we had just under a half a tank? Well, a few miles back down the mountain the gaslight came on. The girls heard Dan say this and they were convinced that we were going to run out of gas. We had not anticipated how much gas we would use driving in low gear. So Dan switched to driving in a higher gear and using the break more. About half way down there was a park so we stopped there to eat supper and let the brakes cool off.

The park where we ate supper was absolutely beautiful and had the cleanest pit toilets I've ever seen. They even smelled good. Here is the sunset we watched as we ate supper.

We did make it all the way down the mountain without running out of gas. We did, however, stop at the first gas station we found.