Another Colorful Friday in Colorado

Tim: Today, we decided to head up to Colorado Springs to see an matinee movie... the newest Adam Sandler movie "Click." It was a typical funny Adam Sandler movie, but it also had a message of living for the moment that was appealing, especially since we have no clue what is coming up for the fall.

As is always the case in Colorado Springs (and Colorado in general, it seems), the traffic was ridiculous and the drivers as bad as ever. We have witnessed our fair share of poor drivers in our many road trips through the years, but Colorado has the absolute worst drivers anywhere. One day, we were up in Colorado Springs and there were over 10 car accidents in a matter of seconds. The radio traffic person even said that "I-25 was jacked up" with car accidents. Candy and I just about got in our own car accident laughing so hard.

Before the movie this afternoon, we took a stroll at a local mall. We stopped at the pet store in the mall and checked out the available pets. Candy took the leading picture with our cell phone of a posing snoozing pooch. We found it pretty amusing.

The pictures below were also taken with the cell phone camera, which is certainly not even close to the camera that Candy normally uses for her awesome images. However, these shots will give you an idea of how amazing the skies get here in Colorado. It seems that every night is a colorful sky show here. Add the mountains to the mix and it is even more spectacular.

As the days here come to a close, we know we have been blessed to be here the last two months. It really is a great place and offers many great exploration opportunities. We have gained a great appreciation for the natural beauty of this place. It will be different to be heading east from here and back to sea level again.

Until our next post, have a great weekend!

Chaco Canyon and Saturn

Candy: Hot. Rough road. Amazing structures. Milky Way in full glory.

These are all indicative of the Chaco Canyon national park. What an amazing area.

Tim and I decided to drive to Farmington, New Mexico, around 8:30pm on Monday. Thirty minutes later we were in the car and 6.5 hours later, we were climbing into bed at a hotel about 40 minutes north of Chaco Canyon.
Our impulsive departure, which was originally intended for Tuesday, turned out to be a great idea. We arrived at Chaco Canyon around 2pm on Tuesday, and after a quick stop at the visitor's center to get a camping site for the night and a map, we claimed site #18 in the campground and proceeded to drive the 9-mile loop around the canyon, stopping to explore the various "great houses," dwellings, and petroglyphs.

Here's our temporary petroglyph. I call it "guy with trail guide reads while girl with camera looks for pictures."

I should mention for those of you who haven't been to Chaco Canyon that it is a collection of ruins of "great houses" and villages built and inhabited by the Chacoan people between 800 and 1200 A.D. They were quite advanced in their engineering, building thoroughfares 30 feet wide connecting all of their villages and aligning all of their dwellings to take advantage of the rising and setting of the sun and moon.

The Chacoans were very concerned about the shape of their villages, and they took great care to build each one in a similar fashion with a long, rear wall, a plaza with several circular structures, and three to four stories of living quarters.

They also had a great, generational knowledge of engineering and also of the rising and setting patterns of both the moon and the sun.

They built numerous circular structures that had roofs of timber supported by huge beams. These were called kivas, and were apparently where the Chacoans worshipped. Most were sunken, and some were elevated in tower structures. It was really amazing to see the perfect circular walls they built out of stone. Here's an unexcavated three-walled circular structure at Pueblo del Arroyo.Quite impressive. Below is a photo of part of one of the largest kivas that has been excavated, which was apparently a communal kiva located at Casa Rinconada. Nearly every kiva featured the keyhole-shaped entry that you can see in the photo below.
The park contains only some of the ruins left by the Chacoans (many more are located outside the park), and we visited those that were accessible from the paved "loop road" in the park. There were four or five other sites that could be reached by hiking into the back country. Since we had Chase with us, we did not hike to those.

Views like this were visible from nearly every nook and cranny of each site.

There are two or three ways to reach the park, and each route consists of pavement until approximately 15-30 miles from the park. Those last miles are very rough dirt roads, which a park ranger later mentioned had shredded a tire on her vehicle. We unwittingly managed to choose the best of the three routes and encountered a 16-mile washboard gravel road.

Still pretty rough, but manageable.

It was really hot when we arrived and so we explored Hungo Pavi, Chetro Ketl (below), and Pueblo Bonito (panorama below) for a couple hours before deciding to rest in the El at the campsite while the sun traversed the canyon and cooled the temperatures. We ventured back out at 7pm and explored the Pueblo del Arroyo and Casa Rinconada ruins. It was easily 10 degrees cooler, and we watched the sunset from the walls of Pueblo del Arroyo (pictured below). Don't worry, we weren't sitting on the walls of the ruin. This trail actually led down a series of steps through the site and we sat there totally alone as the sun went down.

It was quite a moving experience to sit there and imagine what the Chacoans' lives were like and to simultaneously realize that we were seeing the exact same terrain and setting of the sun that they had seen a thousand years before. This is what we saw.
As it turned out, the park rangers hold night sky programs on Tuesdays (& Fridays & Saturdays), so at 9pm we joined several other park visitors lined up to peer through three separate telescopes pointed at Jupiter (and its 4 moons), Mars, and Saturn. I was especially impressed by the sight of Saturn's rings. It was pretty cool.

By then it was very dark, and with no lights in the park other than those of the visitors' vehicles, the sky was a veritable Milky Way display. Growing up on a farm in southwestern Minnesota, I'd seen the white band of the Milky Way several times, but I don't believe I've ever seen such a display of stars in my life.

The enormous number of stars visible in the darkness combined with the bigness of the sky to create an awe-inspiring moment from our prone position on the picnic table.

We slept in the car overnight and made our way back to Pueblo today. It was an inspirational trip, and we highly recommend visiting the area if you're ever near Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Gallup, or the Four Corners area.

I took a bunch of photos, as you can see from the number of images included in this post. Here is my failed attempt to capture the canyon's Fajada Butte in complete darkness (I managed to figure out what went wrong). The streaks are from airplanes passing high overhead.

Although it's not what I hoped to capture, maybe it'll give you some idea of the night sky at Chaco Canyon.

Enjoy the rest of your week. I'll leave you with a quote by Maya Angelou.

"I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights."

Garden of the gods

Tim: Today, Candy and I made a trip up Interstate 25 to Colorado Springs to take some time to visit the Garden of the Gods Park, a registered natural landmark located at the base of Pike's Peak. It is a 1,340 acre free park which is known for its magnificent red sandstone rock formations (see panorama above). The rock formations are so surreal that it looks like Mother Nature teamed with Salvador Dali (the melting watch artist) in forming it.

One of the rocks that is featured in the park is considered by some as the most famous rocks in the country. It is called Balanced Rock and is pictured below. According to the park's website, a layer at the base of the rock has more shale formed from mud that wore away faster and left a small support on which the huge rock is balanced. I had the chance to climb up onto the rock and it really is huge and incredible up close.
Here are some more photos from today. As you will see, the colors are amazing:

Our time in Pueblo is coming to a close, so we are getting ready to head out on June 30th. However, we have one more educational trip to make before we leave. On Tuesday, we are heading down to Chaco Canyon, a remote national park and an ancient urban center of spectacular public architecture in New Mexico. It is part of the sacred homeland of Pueblo Indian peoples of New Mexico, the Hopi Indians of Arizona, and the Navajo Indians of the Southwest.

Candy and I hope all of the dads reading the blog had a great Father's Day. Have a great week!

Great Sand Dunes Rock

Candy: Today we drove to the Great Sand Dunes National Monument & Preserve. It's about two hours southwest of Pueblo, near Alamosa, Colorado, and we saw some really amazing things.

On the way to the dunes we looked to our left on Highway 160 and saw some rocky outcroppings that looked a bit like a "great wall." So we took the next left and drove through La Veta, Colorado, and drove right by several of the unusual rocks. We're still not sure whether they have an official name, but to us they are the "great wall of Colorado."
The dunes are, of course, very sandy, with about 6-8 inches of soft sand on the surface. It was a real workout just to walk from the parking lot to the edge of the dunes, which is about 3/4 of a mile. It was also fairly windy, which increased my concern of getting sand in the camera, so I didn't take as many photos as I would have liked. There are 30 miles of dunes and two of them stand taller than 650 feet.

We arrived at the park around 6pm and were able to enjoy the wonderful light at dusk and the fabulous shadows created by the slanting rays. It was gorgeous, and this is my favorite shot from today.
When we returned to the El, we both had tons of sand in our shoes, as you might imagine. We didn't see as much wildlife as we had hoped to, but we did come across several deer, a couple of elk, and what we're pretty sure was a coyote running across the highway.

On the way back to Pueblo tonight, the pastel tones that hit the mountains from the sunset were astonishing. The mountains truly looked purple. We were oohing and ahhing all the way home.

It's supposed to hit 101 in the next day or two, so I expect we'll be hanging out at the pool a bit more, along with all the other apartment dwellers.

Oh, I almost forgot. Tim had a phone interview this afternoon with a charter school in the Denver area. They want to bring him to campus yet this month and although it's not exactly what he's looking for, it was encouraging for him to get a bite. Perhaps it'll start to roll now.

Enjoy your week and let us know how you're doing.

A recap of the "Pause on Purpose" tour, future thoughts

Tim: For those of you who have been keeping up to date with the blog since we left Hiram, Ohio on March 13th, this posting will be a rehash of all of our adventures. So here are some of the places we have visited during our 10,000+ mile journey through the Western U.S. (I have attached above a map of our current home, Colorado):

Corpus Christi, Texas- World War II aircraft carrier;
USS Lexington, crossed Mexico border at Reynosa, Mexico;
Tombstone, Arizona, Boot Hill, and the OK Corral;Saguaro National Park outside of Tucson, AZ;
Hoover Dam, AZ;
Las Vegas and Western Nevada;
Mono Lake and Enyo Forest, California;
Shasta-Trinity National Forests and Eureka, CA;
Cannon Beach, Seaside, and the Oregon Coast;
Trip to Minnesota through Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota;
Colorado: Pike’s Peak, Royal Gorge- Bridge and Trainride, Cripple Creek, Bishop’s Castle, Seven Falls;
Four Corners trip to Shiprock, NM, Route 66, and Albuquerque, Santa Fe, NM.

Whew! That is a lot to be thankful for, huh? I would put down the Interstate highways we have driven on but that would take a lot longer than this has. The amazing thing is that we saw even more on this trip than I put down on this post. Maybe in the next post I could put down all of the books we have read. I feel like I am in some summer library reading program. It has been an interesting time for both Candy and I.

Another thing that I thought about today…this is the longest I have ever been unemployed in my adult life. I know something great is on the horizon, though, and we both are ready for what is next.

Pueblo, Colorado has been a great place to call home, although we know it is not a place we could stay forever. We have started to look into what our options are for the end of June when we head out of here. It looks like we will head for Minnesota for the month of July.

If something does not happen job-wise by August, we will head for a specific place to settle for the duration (the school year) and find jobs. At this point, our “contingency cities” are Dallas, Texas; Austin, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona; Nashville, Tennessee; Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota; and Tampa/St. Petersburg or Jacksonville, Florida. We expect that it will not come to this, but we have started planning just in case. I will volunteer with a basketball program wherever we head.

Candy has been doing some work getting in contact with some professional photographers lately and has had some great feedback from these pros about her website. I think she is on the verge of breaking through with this side of her skill set. She really is incredibly talented.

As for me, no real leads on any positions. I have really been focusing on the moment lately…we do not have any guarantee of tomorrow and it is not always great to look to the past (although I have learned so much about what I could have done better in my most recent position). I guess I have been making everyday my masterpiece. I have also been using positive affirmations and visualization lately.The great John Wooden has become one of my role models lately…he really had it right.

We had planned to head down to the Great Sand Dunes National Park southwest of here this weekend, but the weather was forecast not to be so good, so we have put the trip off until this week. Hope you have enjoyed this rambing post and you have a great weekend!

A Trip to Seven Falls

Tim: Today we made a trip to another area attraction, Seven Falls (picture above). It was relatively affordable ($8.75 each) and is located just ten minutes from downtown Colorado Springs. Nestled deep within Cheyenne Canyon, it is Colorado's only waterfall to be listed in National Geographic's "List of International Waterfalls." It has been called the “Grandest Mile of Scenery in Colorado.”

It cascades 181 feet in seven distinct steps down a solid cliff of pikes peak granite. Wildlife is everywhere, including hummingbirds, rainbow trout and the rare, waterfall nesting- American Dipper. The picture here is of another of the interesting birds in the area, the Steller's jay:



There were also a lot of chipmunks that were nearly tame and a lot bigger than the ones back in the Midwest. Here is one of them:



Blasted 14 stories straight up through solid granite, a mountain elevator can be used to safely transport all who venture here to the “Eagles Nest” platform, where the most spectacular view of Seven Falls is experienced (or you can climb up there, which is over 170 steps).

The picture below is one Candy took of some dolls in the window of one of the gift shops at the park. They look like little people sitting in a window:



In addition, Native Americans present interpretations of Indian dances at the park. However, today they only performed one show at 6 p.m. and we were there too early for the show.

It has been pretty darn hot here, but interestingly enough, it does not feel too badly. We have been in the upper 90's for the last week, but it is so dry here that the heat index is way lower than the actual temperature.

Have a great day tomorrow!

Candy Rice Photography Goes Live

Candy: Well, it's official. My photography site has been revised for the first time in nearly three years. I was so crazy busy that it languished with old images and weird design.

At any rate, the link to my site is now available at the right. I'd love to hear what you think, and if you find any areas of the site that can be improved please let me know. It's built completely in flash and today's photo is a screen shot of the home page. Enjoy!

In other news, we went to see The Breakup this afternoon. It was pretty good, though for that kind of story I would have preferred a happier ending.

We are planning to spend some time at the pool tomorrow. Temps here have been pretty warm lately. It was 96 today at 4pm, but it doesn't feel all that hot, at least to me. We've spent summers in Alabama where the temps were lower but the humidity was much higher, and it felt miserable to this Minnesota girl.

Here's hoping that you're having a great weekend. We'd love to hear how you're doing.

Pike's Peak Hurts

Candy: Today we took the Manitou and Pike's Peak Railway Cog Railroad up to the summit of Pike's Peak--elevation 14,110.

The train ride was pretty cool and took about an hour and 20 minutes each way, averaging about 6.5 mph both ways. It was a clear day, so we could see quite a ways as we traversed up the mountain.
We both felt pretty well until we actually got off the train at the summit. Then I got kind of woozy and we both got whopper headaches from the altitude. Beth, I don't know how you did it for a whole summer.

I had to sit down a few times while we walked around at the summit. Tim took the photo at the top of the post during one of those recuperative sessions.

We learned something new on the trip. At one point on the Cog Railroad trip, Katharine Lee Bates was so inspired by the view that she wrote a poem that was later set to music. America the Beautiful. Pretty cool. There's even a marker at the summit to commemorate it.
At any rate, we spent the 30 minutes allotted to us by the train company wandering around the summit house, observation decks, and oohing and ahhing over the view.

Pueblo is in the distance in this shot.
We were suckered into the typical tourist shot in front of the sign by another well-meaning tourist, as you can see below.
Here are the trains. We were in the single Aspen car at the back, but we had the best seats at the very front of the train (back of the train from this direction).
By the time we got back to the depot in Manitou Springs, we were both happy to be back to elevation 6,500. We managed to make our way to the nearest Italian restaurant in Colorado Springs, where we downed some Aleve with our diet cokes with lime.

By the time we had finished dinner we were feeling much better and headed back to Pueblo for the evening, using the half hour drive time to discuss the lessons we have learned since leaving Hiram.

All in all, it was a great trip and we enjoyed ourselves.

I've been working on my website lately, and have finally finished it. It should go live by Monday and when it does, I'll put a link on the blog to it so that all three of my photo fans can check it out. :)

Have a great weekend!

June 1st...a sunny day

Tim: After arriving back last night from our Four Corners trip, we decided to take it easy today here in Pueblo. We had an opportunity to go to the bookstore again today and also took Chase to the Pueblo City Park to hit tennis balls for him to fetch. He had a lot of fun, especially when he found a cool mud puddle in the park to roll around in. I guess it was hot, so he deserved it. Some of you have seen him muddy before and it is definitely a sight to behold. The picture below is from today:


The first image on the blog today is a picture of Candy's that she processed in a different way to make it look grainy. It is from our visit to Oregon. The picture below is from our trip last summer to Venice. It really is hard to believe that we were on that Europe trip a year ago:

What's up for the Rice Family tomorrow? We are heading up to Pike's Peak to take the Cog Railway trip. We are planning to get the most out of our time left here.

Have a great day and we will post again tomorrow.