We've had a great visit here at Estes Park, especially seeing Kent and Betty.
But, we must move on.
Next on the schedule, the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO, and the real beginning of the reason we are here. Anna and Evan will be joining us Saturday (after flying here from Raleigh). This is the part of the trip that we have been looking forward to and planning for over two years.
They will be with us for 3 weeks, with Mom and Dad joining us for the middle week.
We're staying at the RV Park (called a Famcamp in the military) on base, Peregrine Famcamp. It is among the prettiest campgrounds we've stayed in. The sites are nestled in among a large grove of pine trees, with almost every site shaded and plenty of space between RVs.
The first thing we did after setting up is to visit the B-52 located at the North entrance to the base. This particular B-52 is notorious because it is only 1 of 2 B-52's to have ever shot down a MIG fighter in the Vietnam War.
Today we met Barbara and Ron Taylor for lunch. Barbara is the former wife of a cousin of mine, Norris Fisher. Clara and Barbara spent quite a bit of time together while I was deployed when in the Air Force. She rented the house next door to Dad's in Nashville and Clara spent quite a bit of time there while I was gone.
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| Barbara Taylor |
Friday, July 29
After a good swim this morning, I accomplished (I hope) my primary objective for this trip to the Air Force Academy. After a lot of false starts and locked doors, I have finally managed to get an appointment with the Cadet admissions office for Anna. It's by no means a big deal in the big scheme of things, but for her to just be able to sit down and talk to someone about what the academy offers will be good. We are set to meet at 10 AM Monday morning. Hopefully it turns out to be a meaningful meeting.
We went to the visitors center today. The last time we visited here, there was a T-37 prominently displayed in the center, however it is gone and in its place are a lot of t-shirts. A bit of a disappointment. However, there is a magnificent film being shown in their theater which follows a year in the life of a freshman at the Academy. It will either scare a kid away from ever considering attending, or it could be the most inspiring thing they will see. It will be interesting to see Anna's reaction.
Later today we visited a display of a T-38. Even though it is painted in the colors of the Thunderbirds, it still brings back fond memories of pilot training when I flew one of them - a different lifetime for sure.
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| This is almost the view the pilot would have flying in formation. |
Saturday, July 30
They have arrived. The blog no longer belongs to me!!!!!!!! I am handing it over to Anna!!!!!
AAANNNAAA!!
Let's just let the record show: we left home in Cary this morning AT 9 IN THE BRIGHT AND EARLY MORNING. By the time we were out of the Denver airport is was like 7ish here... WHICH MEANS 9 OUR TIME! Lets just think about that... 12 hours in the airports and planes. That's a long time y'all. We started out the day at RDU, waited in a ton of long lines and FINALLY boarded our plane. After the almost 3 hour flight (with some LOUD people sitting around us) we landed in Dallas. As soon as the plane was stopped, the flight attendants rushed us off the plane and into the room for unaccompanied minors.
This room. Oh my goodness. There was a TV (thank goodness) but that was about it on the entertainment front. We all just sat around in this room waiting on our flight and watching the outlets to see if there was an open spot when people left. After about 2 hours we went on a field trip to a very disappointing McDonalds. Enough said. Then 2 more hours passed and we were being ushered back out of the room to go board our flight to Denver.
Now this plane, this was a good plane y'all. This plane had bigger, comfier, newer and less scratchy seats. Then to top off this wonderful plane, THERE WERE TV THINGS ON THE BACK OF THE SEATS! It had free TV, music and video games for the flight. Too bad this was the shorter flight, only taking about an hour and a half.
Once we got to the airport we met Mimi and Papa at the gate (or maybe met their cameras) they were both standing at one end of the line with cameras up smiling like crazy people! After getting through all of the airport shenanigans we finally got out of the airport, it took an hour... a long long time to wait for bags.
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| We are finally ready to start our adventure! |
Now we're prepping for tomorrow and I'm here writing this because "if you don't write it each night you lose it."
Sunday, July 31
So today was our first official day in Colorado with Mimi
and Papa… and let me tell you, IT WAS JAM PACKED. We started the day at the
bright and early hour of 7:30 (don’t worry- this summer it doesn’t bother me
anymore.) We kicked off the day with our five-cent tour of the Academy, two
overlooks, the entrance and a drive by the fields. I gotta say, it is a
BEAUTIFUL place, I can totally see doing this for four years!
From there we drove about an hour to Manitou Springs where
we rode the Pikes Peak Cog to the summit of Pikes Peak (aka America’s
Mountain).
The ride up was about an hour and a half and very scenic. It’s hard
to comprehend the size of the boulders we saw today, they were huge and had
obviously fallen at some point. The ride up was super cool, Mimi and Evan were
sitting across from us and at some points it got so steep that they had to prop
up their feet on our chairs to keep from sliding around!
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| A High Five with a passenger on a train stopped on the siding |
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| There were about 200 people on the train |
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| The pitch on the ride is about 25% or 1 foot rise for every 4 feet forward. |
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| Above the tree line, which is about 10,000 feet. |
Once we reached the summit, AT 14,110 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL we
immediately started taking pictures; group selfies, pictures with signs, landscapes,
portraits… you name it, we did it. Then with only a few minutes left, we got 4
of the world famous Pikes Peak FRESH donuts. When we got them they were too hot
to eat, that means FRESH!
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| We made it to the top |
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| A hot donut helped to keep it warm on top. The temperature was COLD! |
Just before we boarded the train for the return down the mountain, it started to snow a little - IN JULY!
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| I think the altitude got to him |
The following are notes that Anna prepared to help us better understand what we were going to see at each significant attraction:
Pikes Peak Cog Railway
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a073vczTVIw 1936 Steam Engine
- Known as America’s mountain
- Late 1800s Zalmon Simmons (tourist) took a mule on a 2 day trip up Pikes Peak for the view and to check on his invention (an insulator for Army telegraph wires
- Mr. Simmons wanted a faster and classier way to the top, so he talked to the hotel owner about it… the hotel owner mentioned a railway to the top and Mr. Simmons funded it
- 1889- Manitou and Pikes Peak railway company began… the top wages was 25c an hour
- Total of 6 engines were used during steam era
- 1. Pikes Peak
- 2. Manitou
- 3. John Hulbert
- 4,5,6- Started naming them by numbers
- 4 is the only engine still operational and can make short, infrequent runs up the track
- Spring of 1891 was very snowy so the opening was delayed until June 30th… the first group taken up was a church choir
- Wanted a smaller car for the slow seasons
- 7- gas powered, made for 23 passengers, first run was June of 1938
- Believed that #7 was the first rack railcar in the world (toothed railway for steep hills)
- 8- Within a year of #7, world’s first diesel-electric cog locomotive
- 8,9,10,11,12- Streamliner coaches that carried up to 56 passengers
- In the 1960s the railway needed more equipment, but the general electric company wasn’t interested in funding it, so Mr. Tutt (president of the railway) traveled to Switzerland to get modern railway supplies and ideas
- No. 13???
- Mr. Tutt brought engines 14 and 15 from switzerland in 1964
- Later brought 16 and 17 to America
- 70s= growing tourism- wanted a train car for 200+people
- 18 and 19- 200+ and diesel
- Mr. Frick expanded shops, railcars and snowplows and helped with swiss/ german transactions with the company
- 20, 21, 22, 23 = snowplows
- First two modern railcars put into service in 1984 (24) and 1989 (25)
- Before 1976 they took the railcars up the mountain 3 times a day
- Now up the mountain 8 times a day
- In the winter they host 1 trip a day, the rest of the day is maintenance work on the cars and the track
From Pikes Peak we drove to The Garden of the Gods, we got there around 2 and realized that we hadn’t had lunch yet! We were so lucky because the visitors center had a very basic cafĂ© with a lovely view of the huge rock formations.
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| Our view for lunch |
Those rock formations were huge. It’s hard to even begin to
think about how big they were. These rocks were either orange or white and had
the most unique textures going from smooth to rough every few feet.
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| Still celebrating the 50th wedding anniversary |
Once we
rounded the first big rock we noticed a few smaller ones that were the perfect
size for bouldering (climbing the rocks without any ropes or harnesses.) Evan
took full advantage of this, spending at least an hour climbing up the same
rock in several different ways before finally standing at the top.
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| Mimi! It's a long way down! |
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| I made it! |
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| Mimi watches from below |
We walked
past a few more rocks before heading back to the car. Although it doesn’t seem
like rocks is the right word. These are huge slabs of sandstone turned upwards
hundreds of feet in the air.
Another part of the park had the famous Balanced Rock.
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| A little help from Anna |
Garden of the Gods
- In the 1870s railroads had moved west.
- In 1871, General Palmer founded Colorado Springs while he extended the lines of the Colorado and Rio Grande Railroad
- In 1879 he tried to get his friends (Charles Perkins - Head of the Burlington Railroad) to build a home in Garden of the Gods and build a railroad from Chicago to Colorado Springs
- He never reached Colorado Springs directly, but he did purchase 240 acres in the Garden of the Gods for a summer home. He later added to his property but never built on it, leaving it for the public to enjoy.
- Perkins died in 1907, but before he did he had made arrangements for the land to become a public park (even though it had been open to the public for years)
- Perkins’ children gave the land to the City of Colorado Springs, it became known as the Garden of the Gods “where it shall remain free to the public where no intoxicating liquors shall be manufactured, sold, or dispensed, where no building or structure shall be erected except those necessary to properly care for, protect and maintain the area as a public park.
- Named by Rufus Cable in 1859 when 2 surveyors went out to explore the area. Cable said “Beer Garden! Why it is a fit place for the Gods to assemble. We will call it the Garden of the Gods”
- The park is a ‘biological melting pot’. Here the grasslands of the Great Plains meet the woodlands of the Southwest and the mountain forest of pikes peak
- Garden of the Gods has been many different ecosystems- inland sea, tropical area, field of sand dunes and swampy floodplain.
- Dinosaurs once grazed the tropical plants, sea serpents swam in the waters and mammoths walked through the deep snow in May- The rocks show what the environment was like over millions of years.
- Timeline
- About a billion years ago, molten rock cooled to create Pikes Peak and the Rockies.
- 310-270 million years ago, the Rockies were worn down a bit
- About 250 million years ago Garden of the Gods had beaches and an inland sea (rift valley)
- The 300 ft orange sandstone rocks were once sand dunes
- Inland sea once covered all of Colorado about 225 million years ago
- Around 155 million years ago dinosaurs were free in the Garden of the Gods
- About 65 million years ago, the Rockies rose, tipping the rocks that we see today upwards (caused by Pacific Plate converging with the North American plate)
- All 5 of Colorado’s life zones can be viewed in the Park due to the different elevations
- The plains have drought tolerant grasses, the foothills have shrubs and small trees, the middle elevation (montane) have thick forests and meadows, the subalpine and alpine are shown with stunted plant growth and the alpine tundra
When we finally got home, Papa and I got to work on editing pictures. Suddenly I regretted taking a picture of every cool looking rock from each angle. There was some serious regret, 400 pictures into editing I was long done, and we weren’t even halfway there yet. Turns out we took at least 900. Yay. Papa insists on deleting a bunch of them, but Mimi and I won’t let him go through with it. We’ve probably only let 50 of the whole group go.
Monday, August 1
This morning we started up bright at early... this time at 7! After putting away our beds (because they fold out of the couches) and eating breakfast we drove around the Air Force Academy for more of a 25 cent tour.
We started out at the visitors center, watching a movie on the first year as a cadet at USAFA. Once that was over, Papa and I dropped Mimi and Evan off at the BX to do some shopping while we headed over to the admissions office to have a meeting with a Academy representative. We both learned a lot about the admissions process and how my application will go through the system... definitely an hour well spent.
We picked up Evan and Mimi at the BX after doing a little shopping ourselves, and headed back to the RV for some lunch and to change into comfy clothes.
For lunch we had hamburgers before Evan, Mimi and I passed out for a solid hour. Some of the best sleep I've had yet. When we all got ready to go, we continued on our 25 cent tour.
Papa started us off at the B-52 on the base, showing us the parts of the plane and telling us stories about when he was a pilot. He flew 94 combat missions and so many more, so judging by when and where this B-52 was flown, we are about 97.974% sure that at some point he flew it, either as a pilot or co-pilot.
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| Papa told us a lot about what it was like to fly this big airplane and its' role in the Cold War |
Our next stop was the Academy itself. We took the trail down to the Chapel and took about 100 pictures of the Chapel. The architecture was so impressive and the stained glass lit up the inside of it beautifully. I can't even begin to describe the size and greatness of it. It was that cool.
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| There is a display in the visitor center of what a typical room of a cadet looks like. |
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| The Cadet Chapel is a magnificent structure |
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| Polaris Hall, the newest building on the campus |
From the Chapel we looked out over the dorms, classes and eventually made our way through the Honor Court and Polaris Hall. Polaris Hall was finished being constructed this year and is the new center for character and leadership development. All of it's walls are glass and the building is shaped like the tail of an airplane, pointed at the Polaris star.
After all the walking around the grounds, we headed back to the RV for some water and to upload a ton of pictures, because even though we said we'd lay off on the pictures, it was kinda impossible with how beautiful the campus was.
After getting all charged up (cameras and rest) we went back out, this time we went to see the T-38 (a plane that Papa flew while in the Air Force) and then went to Cheddar's for dinner.
Air Force Academy
- Cadet wing= 4000 students- 40 squadrons with 100 cadets each
- Must participate in a sport each semester
- Established April 1, 1954
- Chapel was meant to have 19 spires, but was reduced to 17 spires due to budget cuts
- Arnold Hall= Military/ academy exhibits, snack bar and auditorium
- Honor Court= Between Chapel and Arnold Hall- Bronze statues and aircraft memorials
- Field House= Indoor fields, ice rink, basketball court, etc.
- Airpower leaders (before air force was a separate service) argued that they needed a school dedicated to war in the air to train future airmen
- Once Air Force was established in 1947 the academy had legitimacy behind it
All in all it was another great day, now we're just packing up the RV and car for the trip to Snow Mountain Ranch tomorrow!
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