Colorado Springs, CO

Day #71-80 (October 10-19, 2022): An early, uneventful, direct flight from Denver yielded a nice, early landing in Nashville at 9:35 am CST, and for the next 9 days, we spent our time visiting with family and friends, catching up on work and mail, planning and fine-tuning our next leg’s reservations, celebrating Neil’s 13th birthday, and going to a variety of doctor well checkups. Bethany was sick with strep the last 2 days of our visit but was feeling better for our return flight back to Denver on the 19th.

An early flight from Nashville yielded an even earlier arrival time to Denver at 7:35 am MST. Wow! How about that for an early start to the day?! We reunited with Mac, our truck, and our RV and drove south to Colorado Springs, picked up a Walmart grocery order (delivered right to our RV door…so nice!), and parked at Mountaindale RV Resort.

We spent the rest of the day unpacking, resting, and settling back into RV living as we have now officially embarked on Leg 2—The Southwest Loop—of our year-long journey! What a blast Leg 1 was! These first few weeks have been priceless, filled with so much fun and adventure, new sights and experiences, and oh, how they have flown by! If time could slow down just a bit, that would be nice…and helpful. It’s hard to keep up! Ha! Nonetheless, we are so excited and thankful for the rest of our journey!

Day #81 (October 20, 2022): While Chris spent an unexpected day in Colorado Springs undergoing follow-up tests to his routine bloodwork from earlier in the week, Emily and the kids spent the day resting and doing school in the RV. We learned a new game, Flags of the World, and started our next unit study: Earth Science.

Day #82 (October 21, 2022): Chris continued with a slew of follow-up tests with everything returning normal thankfully. Turns out, anemia runs in his family, and as of today, he now takes an iron supplement to keep his iron in check. This unexpected rendezvous of medical tests and procedures proved to be a blessing in disguise since afterwards, Chris’ energy increased and his shortness of breath while hiking was gone, which proved to be all-the-more-important and quite timely, as we would be spending the next couple months hiking in high altitudes.

Over the past couple days, Chris and Neil shopped on Facebook Marketplace and found a good price on a used OneWheel, something Neil had been thinking about and saving up for, for quite a while. So, after school which included making playdough models of the earth, Emily and the kids drove about an hour north of our campground to test-ride the OneWheel (well, Neil test-rode it) and buy it. Bonus: we happily stumbled upon an In-and-Out for dinner nearby! Neil was super pumped and ready to spend lots of time learning and practicing his new purchase. Unfortunately, our current campground doesn’t offer much grass or flat, level ground for practicing. Nevertheless, he and the girls were determined to find the best possible spot to practice for the time being. They found a small patch of grass a few campsites over, enough to satisfy for now. Bless!

Day #83 (October 22, 2022): The kids had one thing on their minds for today: finding level grassy ground to practice the OneWheel. Emily, on the other hand, had another: get Mac groomed! Thankfully, after we dropped Mac off for his very overdue grooming (we’ve been trying to get an appointment for over a month; turns out dog groomers are few and far between near national parks, and they evidently stay 1-2 months booked out), we found a public park in Colorado Springs (Memorial Park) with a large area of level, green grass. The kids took turns practicing this harder-than-it-looks electric-skateboard-like activity. It takes time building balancing skills and such that are needed for riding the OneWheel. Neil was gracious to share his new purchase with his sisters so that they too could practice and learn.

Interestingly, Memorial Park is the former location of a test lab of Nikola Tesla. Because all our kids have an infatuation with Tesla cars, we took a quick picture of all that remains of the site: a small plaque.

We ate lunch at Golden Gyros, a small Greek restaurant across the street from Colorado Springs Olympic Training Center. We picked Mac up from his grooming appointment, and on our drive home, we found a second park for some more practice. Yes!

Day #84 (October 23, 2022): It’s always a blessing when Sundays aren’t travel days, since I think we can all agree, travel days are NOT our favorite days of the week. LOL! They tend to be early, hectic mornings and long, exhausting evenings. It’s nice to be able to rest in and enjoy morning virtual church together, as we pause and catch our breath from a week full of feasting on God’s creation.

In the late afternoon, we drove through Garden of the Gods, a National Natural Landmark in Colorado Springs, as we listened to the park’s free audio tour. It’s a quick drive through the impressive red sandstone rock formations. We stopped along the way to take a few pictures with our favorites, such as Kissing Camels, Balanced Rock, and Steamboat Rock. They have a nice Visitor and Nature Center where we looked at exhibits, watched the film, and perused the gift shop. It was close to closing, so we didn’t spend a lot of time at the Garden of the Gods, but it was enough to see the highpoints. We will have to save a hike here for another time.

Day #85 (October 24, 2022): New fact to us: Colorado Springs is known as Olympic City USA. Even though it has never hosted the Olympics games, Colorado Springs is the home to the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center, the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum, 25 National Governing Bodies of Sport headquarters, several national sports organizations, four international federations of sports, and 82 Olympians! Nice!

So, today is all about the Olympics! First: The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum, a brand-new top-notch museum of all things Olympic. They have an impressive, complete collection of Olympic medals as well as state-of-the-art interactive technology and activities throughout. We opted for the Podium Pass, which included a personal tour of the museum. Our tour guide did an exceptional job of walking us through the history of the Olympics and telling us fun, interesting stories about some Olympians. We saw quite an assortment of equipment, uniforms, and memorabilia from previous Olympians. It was all very inspiring and fun.

Emily’s most impressive and inspiring Olympian takeaway was learning about Trischa Zorn, someone she had never heard of before. To her surprise, Trischa Zorn is the most decorated athlete in history—a swimmer who has won almost twice as many medals as Michael Phelps! What?!! Yep! She has won 55 medals (41 gold, 9 silver, 5 bronze), broken 8 world records, and competed in SEVEN Olympic games (that’s 24 years of Olympic competitions!!). How have we never heard of her before?! One reason is because she competed in the Paralympics Games, rather than the much-more-televised Olympic Games. Overcoming legal blindness caused by a condition called aniridia (she was born without irises) and selling many of her valuable medals to self-fund her training and paralympic career, Trischa Zorn has an incredibly inspiring story of dedication, perseverance, and determination on her journey to becoming the most decorated athlete in history. Wow!

Afterwards, we headed to Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives featured restaurant, Skirted Heifer, for some fantastically delicious burgers. We would definitely recommend this stop if you are ever in the area.

Next, we went to the Olympic & Paralympic Training Center for a group tour of this huge, amazing complex (a converted air force base as a matter of fact). It was cool to see Olympians and Paralympians training in their sport-specific training areas. Maybe we will see some of them on TV during the next Olympic games!

That night, we watched the Olympic-inspired movies, Miracle and Miracle on Ice. The scoreboard from this famous miracle-hockey-game is on display in The Olympic Museum. Pretty cool!

Day #86 (October 25, 2022): Chris really needed a solid uninterrupted workday after last week’s unexpecteds. So, Emily and the kids set out early for a day of car-school and adventure. Drive-time is an opportunity for the kids to do their individual subjects such as math and grammar, as well as to take turns reading our earth science lesson aloud.

Although southern California is famous for its oversized majestic living Sequoia trees, Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Florissant, Colorado, is the only place with— petrified Sequoias. In fact, because of an ancient nearby volcanic eruption, the entire park is a geologist’s treasure trove of fossils captured in shale rock.

Next, we drove to nearby Cripple Creek Heritage Center. Cripple Creek is a historic gold mine town that offers bucket-list-worthy tours of an old gold mine, which unfortunately was closed for the season (Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine Tour). The free museum was very nice and well done. Another fun thing about the small town of Cripple Creek: during the warmer seasons, wild descendants of gold mine burros wander freely around town. Unfortunately for us, they had already been put in their winter shelter for the season. Too bad.

Bethany has been asking to see wolves ever since we didn’t spot any in Yellowstone and didn’t have an opportunity to go to the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center outside the west entrance of Yellowstone. So, today is her day to see wolves! We booked the afternoon feeding tour at the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center,which is home to rescued foxes and wolves. During our visit, we learned some interesting facts about wolves. Evidently, wolves are a keystone species that have gotten a bad rap from fairy tales (think Big Bad Wolf) even though very few humans have been killed by wolves in American history. According to our guide, in general, because wolves are actually quite shy and scared of humans, they are not a threat to human safety (although a rabid wolf is a different story). Some animals we saw during our visit to the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center included the swift fox, red fox, gray wolves, red wolves, Mexican gray wolves, New Guinea singing dogs, and some horses. The center offers more up-close interactions with the wolves, but you have to be 18+ years of age, so that’s not an option for us today. Bethany’s bucket list includes a return visit when she turns 18. At the end of our tour, our tour group said good-bye to the wolves by howling in unison as loud as we could, and the wolves said good-bye back to us with a very long, loud howl in return. The howls lasted well over a minute; it was pretty cool! Bethany loved every second!

On the drive home, we listened to a short, recommended audiobook, Bears on Hemlock Mountain. It was ok; none of us loved it.

Wow! It's been a long and full day, but very educational and thus oh, so satisfying for a homeschool mama!!

Day #87 (October 26, 2022): Another day of adventure and car-school! First, the whole family headed to Bishop’s Castle, an impressive, hand-built-by-one-man, rock structure, located about an hour south from our campground. It was like walking into a very rustic, medieval castle, complete with stained glass windows, suspended bridges, and towers with spiral staircases. Very neat!