Tuesday, June 27, 2006

So after the bike ride ended Sandy's parents came and picked us up. We drove to Glenwood Springs and met her sisters and their families for the weekend, we all stayed at the 100+ year old Hotel Colorado. It was their parents 40th wedding anniversary so we all hung out for the weekend to celebrate.
On Saturday we rode a tram up to the top of a mountain next to the town where there was kind of a tourist trap thing. There is a cave up there that they give tours of, it was pretty cool.

This is the cave which looks like it might be made out of plastic or something, however I'm pretty sure it was all real. It looked much more authentic in person although they did stress that we not touch anything in the cave, hmmm.
Sandy got a "cave kiss" while we were in there. The tourist trap part was the "thrill rides" and "Indian teepee" there was a kind of gravity powered rollercoaster thing that I was kind of interested in but we decided not to spend the money on that.
Later we drove up to a nearly defunct town up in the mountains named Marble. 100 years ago it was a booming marble quarry with a huge building for cutting and sculpting the stone. They quarried stone for the Lincoln Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier among other things. Then at some point the whole business went to crap, the building burned the railroads serving it went away and most of the town disappeared. There is currently some quarrying going on there but it's hard to get a feel for how much really. There were some big blocks of stone waiting to be hauled away, here's Sandy holding one up.



At one point Sandy absconded with our godson Zach and tried to teach him a bunch of nature stuff, but pretty soon his dad got wise to that and separated them. Here she is looking for a lizard or something to tell him about.



There was a big marble wall that used to be part of one of the quarry buildings, it had some curious marmots living in it.



After that we had a nice dinner and then sent Ruth and Dick on a buggy ride to get them out of our hair for a while.













Here's the wild party we had in their room while they were out on their ride.




That's the end of the vacation pictures. We did go and have a soak in the hot springs the next morning which was nice.
After that we had a long car ride back to Denver followed by a short night and more travel to get back here so we could work at least some of the day on Monday. It was all fairly mundane travel stuff except there was one brief interlude in the Denver airport where I thought I was going to get in a fistfight with a racist jackass but it didn't really amount to anything.
Now we're back to our usual routine until tomorrow when we are scheduled to have dinner with Ron, Paula and Sarah, then over the 4th of July weekend we go up to Sawbill for their 50th anniversary and all employee reunion. We're also hoping to spend some time at our property up there.

5 comments:

Betsy said...

Y'all know how to party it up with the marmots! I'm interested in hearing more about the "cave kiss". It sounds illicit.

Carrie and Rob said...

any marmot close-ups? next to otters and prairie dogs, they're my favorite cute animals (they even beat out meerkats, in my opinion).

-c

W.F. Decker said...

Here are three other Glenwood Springs area attractions that we have found interesting in the past: the old cemetary where Doc Holiday is buried (did you hike up there?), the memorial in Glenwood Springs for the firefighters that died there a few years ago (you can also hike up to the site of the fire and see crosses marking the spots they occupied when the fire raced up the canyon--did you see any of this?), and the golf course in Carbondale which is "below" Mt. Sopris and along the way to Marble (did you play that course--if not, you and I will have to do this sometime!!).

Anonymous said...

Hey Will-
Great blog- Mike and I enjoyed your first two entries. We're curious, though- what happened with the racist jackass at the airport? Sandy didn't mention that!

Anonymous said...

Hey Will...thanks for changing the blog so that your Aunt Anonymous can leave comments.
Back in the 60's/early 70's a bunch of my high school/college friends spent a winter in Marble camping, smoking some illegal stuff and generally doing the hippie thing (which includes some stuff that I won't mention here). I've heard lots about Marble over the years but never the stuff about the acutal marble. Thanks