August 17, 2013
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Epic Road Trip, Day 6, part 3
After visiting Garden of the Gods and having our picnic there, we moved on to other scenic vistas. We went to the Starsmore Discovery Center where there were enough flowers in bloom to attract several kinds of wildlife, like this butterfly.
And, because I'm a sucker for patterns, I got a close up of this tree bark.
After visiting the Center, we went to the Helen Hunt Falls. There is a visitor's center there, too, but we were more interested in climbing the falls and getting pictures.
And getting pictures of Kendrah getting pictures of my sister and my BIL.
And of Quin's pouty face as he continued his trend of being unhappy with everyone and everything.
And one of him smiling. 
And dangling his feet over the falls.
There's my sister, BIL and daughter at the top bridge over the falls.
And my daughter, looking absolutely adorable, at the base of the falls.
The Center had hummingbird feeders out, and the hummingbirds were loving it. Kendrah got a good photo of one flapping it's wings but the only decent one I got was of it sitting still.
Then we wandered over hill and dale through the outskirts of North Cheyenne Canon (and yes, that's spelled correctly, except for missing the squiggle over the middle n) and caught some fantastic views. My BIL showed us a large mansion-like home with a view similar to this and said it was worth a million dollars. I was thinking that was really good but he thought it was wildly expensive. I explained that the average home price in my town, for an average home, is $500,000. So from my perspective a home with a view like this for only a million was practically like giving it away. Not that I could afford a million dollar home, here or there.
We went through a tunnel, so I took a picture. This time I wasn't driving, but it still turned out looking like I was, and not paying attention to the camera. Oh well.
We headed for The Broadmoor, a 5 star hotel, just to look around the grounds and to see if we could blend in enough to pass ourselves off as guests. We parked a fair distance away and admired two fawns grazing in someone's yard. There was a doe across the street a ways with a broken leg. She was skin and bones, I could count her ribs and I got a picture of her but it's a little too disturbing to post. Instead, I focused on making Kendrah cross someone's yard to get a picture of her with a Mary-Poppins-like statue.
There's one portion of the hotel. The hotel is actually in 2 parts, a west side and an east side, with two large ponds separating the two buildings. There were swans nesting on shore, so I walked up close and got a picture of one of the cygnets.
There are lots of interesting architectural details that made me laugh, claw feet on the garbage cans, faces in the brick fireplace, a little bear in the waterfall flowing between two staircases outside, staircases with individually painted tiles, eccentric stuff like that. Then, going inside, I was struck by the dome ceiling, the chandeliers, the incongruous escalators, and walls of glassed in, dusty old wine bottles. It was kinda fun to walk around and see what separates a 5* hotel from any other. And, well, the answer is....everything.
After we had gawked enough in the lobby, we went outside to the Carriage Museum, a free museum on the verge of closing for the day so we bustled in and out with plenty of ohhing and ahhing.
Outside, there was a plaque for the Pony Express rider. We saw a lot of stuff in regards to the Pony Express, kinda fun to have a reoccurring theme popping up everywhere we went.
After that, we headed back to my sister's for dinner and bed. We were planning on taking off early the next day. Next stop, Utah!
