Happy Halloween

Main St. in Oakley, KS. It's been emptied out because the local high school had an away game, and everyone who might have otherwise been on Main St. at six in the evening, went to the game. Carolyn and I are staying at the Annie Oakley Motel, but, according to the local librarian, Annie Oakley never had anything to do with the name of this town.

No, your eyes do not decieve you, and this isn't photoshopped. That's a genuine very large copy of a Van Gogh painting of sunflowers in front of the Pizza Hut and next to the Beef Jerky place in Goodland, KS. The other thing they have in Goodland is the High Plains Museum where they have thousands of items that used to belong to the pioneers who settled in Kansas including a large model of the first helicopter in Kansas. The model has moving parts, for those of you who like helicopter models with moving parts.

Amusing tower in Genoa, CO. This was built by the old geezer in the picture with the knife stuck through his hand. My definition of "old geezer" is someone of the male persuasion who's my age or older. Anyway, he stocked it with all kinds of stuff. Many of the items are unable to be identified by someone younger than the geezer in the picture. You can see a bunch of the things he has on sale in the second picture. The top picture shows the tower. The old guy says you can see six or seven states from the top floor. Unfortunately, they don't paint the states in contrasting colors. I'll have to write an email to someone in charge of painting the states when I figure out who that is. The bottom picture shows Carolyn holding some bones. Each is a baculum from a walrus. I leave it as an exercise for the perspicacious student to find out where on the walrus the baculum is located.

After we came down from Pikes Peak, we went the the nearby "Garden of the Gods". In the interest if clarity of nomenclature, I intend to send an email to whoever is in charge of naming this place suggesting a name change to "Garden of Amusingly Shaped Rocks." You're probably thinking, right now, "Henry is way too easily amused." My contention is that being easily amused is actually a good thing...

Photos from the top of Pikes Peak. They told us how many states we could see from the top on a clear day, which this was, but I forget the actual number. So I took pictures in four directions, I leave it as an exercise for the perspicacious student to count the states you can see in the pictures.

Going up Pikes Peak by train. You can walk up, that is, you're allowed to walk up, but it's over 14,000 feet high. At the top, a normal blood oxygenation percentage is somewhere between 70 and 80 percent. Mine was 76%. At sea level, we put people on oxygen if they have an oxygenation percentage lower than 90%. I was breathing deeper and faster than I normally do, and I got tired pretty easily, but I was able to walk around and take pictures for a while.

One of my travel priorities, in addition to natural wonders, is engineering wonders. The Royal Gorge Bridge, 1000 feet above the river, is one such marvel. As you can see, above, they had to re-cable it or it would have fallen into the gorge. My pictures don't do it justice. It's beautiful.

Top PIcture: The river at the bottom of Royal Gorge
Second Picture: Royal Gorge Bridge as seem from the river bank
Third Picture: Royal Gorge Bridge, from the river bank with telephoto lens
Bottom Picture: View from the Incline Railway that takes you 1000 feet down from the bridge to the river

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. The highest, biggest sandbox in the country.

Scenes from lobo overlook at the top of a mountain that we "climbed" by car along a 3 mile dirt road, part of which was covered with snow (late October). Amusingly, we got good cell phone reception at the top.

In western Colorado, just about anywhere you go, you see amazing mountain scenery.

We went to The Springs Resort to "take the waters." They have a series of pools fed by a hot mineral spring. By carefully running the water from one pool to the next, they can gradually lower the temperature of the water, and we can select the pool with the temperature we want. The name of the town, Pagosa Springs, takes its name from a native American word meaning "water with a strong smell." It does smell of sulfur, but it's mild enough that we thought of it as medicinal, and otherwise ignored it. We didn't get a miraculous cure of our bronchitis, but we did feel better after soaking for a few hours than we did when we came in. Of course, that could have been due to the antibiotics we're taking...

Note: I didn't bring my camera to The Springs Resort. This is a picture from their website.