Vacation: Horse Ride and Louis CK

Despite being a last minute decision for what is one of the more popular activities in Garden of the Gods and despite all the rain, we managed to get in a horse ride.  Our timing was almost perfect because on the way back out of the park it started to sprinkle and that was the sprinkle that turned into several days of parking lot-flooding rain.  Have you noticed a theme yet related to our vacation.  Rain.

Eryn loved the horse ride even though the shorter ride isn't a lot of time on the horse, particularly when you factor in the in-town riding on roads out to the park and back.

Here's Eryn on Whinnie.  Big smile!  Eryn, not the horse.  She learned that different horses have different bowel-voiding preferences.  Some like to walk while taking a dump.  Some like to stop.  Some like you to get up in the stirrups while stopped to relieve pressure.  Important skills when the apocalypse kicks in and you want to be The Postman.  They didn't explain that part in the book or the movie.  Get a horse that can void on the run - it'll potentially save you from the bad guys during a chase.



In the park.  You can see some of the washed out nature showing that the rain didn't start just because we showed up. It had been going on for a while.  A few places, like 7 Falls, were closed down due to flooding damage.


My horse, red.  Not the horse butt.  The horse ears.  He was afraid of flapping rain jackets/ponchos.  Nice, eh?  Given all the rain.  I wore my pullover and decided I'd just get wet if it came to that.  Our guide told us that he had always heard Red was afraid of flapping ponchos but hadn't realized how bad it was until a guy tried to change his poncho on him a week or so earlier despite the warning and Red had totally freaked out.


Beautiful place to go for a horse ride.  I wished we had done the longer ride despite the impending rain.


Eryn had the back of the team (if you don't include the guide).  Nice place to be if you wanted to hear the history tour portion of the ride.


Here you can appreciate the clouds.  Supposedly you're able to see Pikes Peak on clear days.  We never saw Pikes Peak unless we were on it and turning around because I have ethical issues with paying private costs to see the top of a mountain when I can go to Rocky Mountain National Park and pay the people to see the mountains.  I noticed on the tourist web sites that I'm not the only one to have made that decision.


Eryn with some of the Garden of the Gods rocks in the background.


As an interesting aside, I met this guy who may or may not be Louis CK.  He's got enough young girls of the appropriate ages to be convincing.  My sister is convinced it's him.  She thinks I'm holding out on her when I say he's a dad from Oklahoma who moved to Colorado, as though I'm protecting his known desire not to have people invading his space and going all paparazzi on him.  She'll just have to believe what she believes.


Some live action footage of riding in the Garden on Red.



And an over-the-shoulder video of Eryn.  Literally.  I found trying to use a handheld camera to record behind me while riding a horse to be particularly difficult.  I should have been wearing the bike camera Ming got me.  I bet it works equally well on horses as long as I don't try to mount it to them.

Vacation: Garden of the Gods

Taking a while to get the vacation photos out here.  I plead busy.  Despite a long weekend.  I intend to speed up, if only to get back to a bit of book blogging.  Jen remembered Garden of the Gods fondly, although the last time we went it was almost empty because it was off season.  There were a lot more tourists this time, although given the several days of nearly flood-level rain, you would have expected a few less people in the rocks and a few more people locked in their hotel rooms enjoying recreational drug use.  Then again, Colorado Springs is medical only, not recreational, so perhaps they all headed back to Denver when the rain really kicked in.  I hope they got a cup of coffee on the way like we did at the very friendly bikini coffee shop.  Which is entirely deceptive because only one day a week is someone serving coffee in a bikini.  The other days they're in (potentially ass-baring) lingerie.  She was very nice for a partially clothed barista.  My coffee was good and she chatted with Jen for a while about the good hours, the good pay, the pleasant customers, and being able to spend more time with her kid.

I digress.  Here is a gratuitous picture of rocks at the Garden of the Gods.  When I posted one of these to Facebook, Facebook did the social thing and told me Jen's cousin had also recently been to Garden of the Gods with his family.  At the time I thought "well, that's nice", but that was before I heard that perhaps he'd hauled his family out there under pretense to force a divorce decision outside Minnesota.  The socially share-able moment is now less endearing.  And yet the rocks and the kissing camels remain.



Kicking it up a notch.  Rocks AND Eryn. She was very worried as the rain rolled in and we could hear thunder.  I don't do lightning after the accident.  I'm worried with all that metal I stand out like a lightning rod.  I'm also worried sharks can detect me easier and might be tempted to explore my electrical charge.  I also have a paranoia that I'll lift something heavy and bend my hip and walk in a circle the rest of my days.  But the lightning one is topmost.  It's rubbed off on Eryn and she worries for me now so I don't have to worry.


Back to just the rocks.  Since last time we were there they've instituted a lot of signs to try and keep people off the rocks and on the trails, to preserve some of the natural growth and discourage erosion.  It wasn't working so well.  In the clearly marked areas, there were large groups of people.  This was not one of those areas (just to be above board).  Wherever I could, I collected bits of trash to post on Instagram for Litterati.org.


Rocks...with a bird.  Good job J.B., now your initials live on not only carved into the rock, but in a picture.  I hope that was the immortality you were hoping to achieve.


Here's a bird with more focus than the rocks.  An iPhone camera and my personal little handheld are not optimal for all picture-taking possibilities.  This would have been a much nicer picture with Jen's DSLR.


This was the least amount of rain during our visit.  The parking lot was a pool much of the trip and, even when it wasn't raining, it was humid and sticky.  Made for nice pictures though.  Looks like something out of a Chinese valley series.


Or Avatar.  I'm going with Avatar because Ming hates Avatar.  If he thinks Colorado looks like the set of Avatar, maybe he'll see big blue creatures everywhere if he goes there for the recreationals.