September Family Vacation -- 4th Stop

From South Dakota, we headed south to Colorado so that Brett could begin his efforts of selling me on his dream state. He has felt a huge pull to that area since he served his mission there in the late 90's. He has been hoping to settle there someday for a decade now. His efforts to convince me to relocate there weren't proving very effective, so he decided to let Colorado itself do the work . . .

I'm hooked! I have never seen so many beautiful and amazing things in such close proximity to each other. We arrived there on a Tuesday and stayed until Sunday evening. Here are some the great things that we did and saw -- I guess you could call them Colorado's selling points.

The Garden of the Gods

We had a picnic here amidst these amazing red rock formations.

The Cave of the Winds

After lunch we drove to a visitor's center on the edge of a deep gorge and went on a tour of an underground cave. The tour lasted about 45 minutes and we were able to see lots of cool cave formations while we were underground: cave coral, drinking straws, stalagtites, stalagmites, and cave bacon. The cave was a huge network of interconnected chambers. Brett and I found it really interesting. Jordan and Kade saw all they needed to see in the first 15 minutes and got a little bit whiny and troublesome for the rest of the time. There wasn't any way to ditch out early, so Brett did his best to convince them to be patient -- each and every time they whined, complained, or whimpered he simply took a closeup picture of them, flashing them to a shocking degree of blindness with his camera -- a might bit cruel, but suprisingly effective.

Cave coral

Drinking straws

A cave pilar offset by seismic activity.

Cave bacon

Flash!