Pikes Peak

Our first adventure today was a trip on the Pikes Peak Cog Railroad.  Awesome is the only word that can describe our day.  The trip up was cool, we saw various rock formations including one that looked like Santa's Sled.  We also saw Aspens, flowers, and Yellow Bellied Whistling Marmots. We continued to travel above the tree line into the clouds.  It was really cool. Out tour guide was funny, telling many "Doug Worthy" bad jokes.

Once me made it to the summit, Doug and the girls wanted to try the world famous Pikes Peak Donuts that we have seen on television.  Sadly, they were not gluten free so I had to settle for chips instead.  Then we did a little souvenir shopping.

That left us with about 15 minutes to explore the peak. It was so cold, 35 degrees with a wind chill of 26.  We were all glad that we wore our sweatshirts.  Although it was very foggy today, the clouds did shift for a few moments to reveal breath-taking views.  Doug was very happy about that, since the last time he visited (back in 1986) it was so foggy, he could not see a thing.  We got some pretty awesome pictures above the cloud tops.

 Before we knew it out time at the top was over and we had to board the train to go back down.  On our decent we saw a heard of big horned rams.  It was pretty cool to see them just out in the wild like that.  It was a fun trip, one I am sure we will all remember.

The next part of our adventure was to go to The Great Sand Dunes Oasis Campground.  We typed in the address to our trusty GPS, fondly named Jessie, and headed on what was supposed to be a 3 hour drive.  Well..... Jessie proved herself not to be as trust worthy as we thought.  She lead us to the middle of a wheat field, about 30 minutes away from our destination.  We had to call the campground for directions three times before we finally made it. UGHHHHHHH!

I will say this is a very clean, and quiet campground.  I even got 2 loads of laundry done.  Now we are hoping for an very uneventful night; however, there is a chance of thunder storms in the forecast so we could be rocking in the camper like last night. The winds on Cheyenne Mountain yesterday evening were so bad I thought we were going to end up in Oz.  

Anyway, the view here is amazing, and we enjoyed it while we ate dinner.  Now we are all in the pod, relaxing before tomorrow's adventure.