July 19

Holy cow, it's great to be in CO. So happy to have an excellent campsite, to be at altitude (cooler!), and to have some topography to look at. Great sleep about a mile higher and a whole lot cooler than our last night in the tent a couple days ago (Oklahoma flatlands). It’s hard to imagine a better spot, high up on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain, looking back east over the lights of Colorado Springs below, and beyond them the plains we crossed yesterday. Wish we were going to be here a week! This morning up pretty early (we can call it early thanks to two time zones in three days) and rolled downhill for bagels at Panera and yet another helpful visitors’ center. Off directly to the country’s only mountain zoo, and yes, we fed those giraffes we’d been looking forward to meeting for a couple thousand miles. Their tongues are eerily long and precisely prehensile, but it’s just the lips they need when eating giraffe crackers. Other big hits were the tapirs, the meerkats (we all thought of Spencer for some reason), and the river otters. Took a familiar ski-lift chair to the top of the zoo where there was rock climbing to be done inside a big yurt. Got us thinking, but too hot and tired and hungry now to think about doing the real thing, so off for haircuts and other errands and some quieter hours. Late afternoon, though, and we were touring around Garden of the Gods, amazed at the differentness of the landscape. What a striking place. It’s almost impossible to imagine having a park like this (a free park, mind you) so close to any city in the east, but I think even these red spires fade into the background of daily life here. The hairdresser working on me is a native and she didn’t even mention Garden of the Gods in her first five suggestions for what we should do. Imagine. Still, maybe that means we’ve got three or four other days to spend here on some other trip to follow her agenda. Anyway, off to the park with climbing equipment but little information and found great scrambling, great photo opportunities, and one obvious line to put a rope on and get us all up on. Really excellent fun, and good people to interact with. Here’s Liz bouldering with her new friend Matthew McConaughey. OK, he says his name is Bruce, but we know that’s just to keep the crowds away. And here's Clare cranking away for the first time in a while too.

Incredible sunset on puffy clouds then home to camp. Great day.