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| Panorama from Mile 12, Pike's Peak |
Hello, my friends!
How long it's been! Not that long, really, not when you measure it relative to my previous silences. But it feels long--at least to me.
Have I mentioned that I have a romantic husband? Maybe alluded to it just a smidge bit? In case I haven't, let me say this: I have a romantic husband. In fact, he's often better at this game than I am.
One thing about him traveling so much for work is that he racks up the bonus points for plane tickets and hotel stays FAST. This translates into us being able to travel more as a couple than we'd likely be able to do otherwise--and help out our families from time to time with a ticket here or there.
As you know from my previous post, Sean decided to cash in some of those points on Valentine's weekend and planned a getaway to a secret location. Two hours before I left for the airport he emailed me my boarding passes--for Colorado Springs.
Now, Sean travels a lot, but I'm no novice myself. I've trekked all over the globe and back. The funny thing is, I get much more anxious doing it when it's on my own than when I'm with Sean, or even anyone else. Comfort in numbers, I guess. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I made it to the airport fine, waited patiently through a reeeeaaaaalllllllly slow security line (they were training), and boarded with the rest of the peons (when I'm not traveling with Sean, I don't get to ride his coat tails for early boarding or any of the other perks) and settled into my front-row seat.
It took me about 30 seconds of stealthy sideways glances to realize that my seatmate was crying. Of course, once this realization was made, I had a choice: stoically ignore her emotional distress and pretend that everything is ok, or reach out and see if I can help?
What the hell, I thought. I'm never going to see her again.
"Hey," I said. "I know this is weird, but you seem to be upset. I'm literally a stranger on a plane right now, so if you need to talk, we can."
To tell the truth, I expected her to tell me to take a hike. Instead, she gave a watery laugh and dried her eyes, and her story came out in bits and pieces. Marriage is hard sometimes, that's the long and short of it, and she felt lost and angry and hurt. For the next two hours, three glasses of wine (two for her, one for me), and a 15-minute terrifying pocket of turbulence, I listened, she vented, we swapped stories, we laughed, we even talked a little bit about the future. As we approached the runway, she told me that it had been the best flight she'd ever taken, and thanked me profusely for reaching out. One we were on the jetway, we exchanged phone numbers and email addresses.
Sure, reaching out felt awkward and took me out of my comfort zone and might have resulted in a cool shutdown and a cold shoulder from my seatmate, but it didn't. Sometimes you are right where you're meant to be when you're supposed to be... and it's just up to you to do the rest.
Anyway, I lost sight of my seatmate in the trek through the airport, though I did catch her eye again at baggage claim and waved goodbye. By that time, Sean had met up with me right past security and given me these pretty flowers. (No, I totally did NOT put them in the ice bucket in the hotel, in the sink, and draped the mirror and faucet behind with a towel to take this picture. I'm not sure why you would even think that.) He had driven with them down from Denver, and I couldn't bear to leave them behind, so I manhandled them with me back on the plane home--and they held up surprisingly well!On our drive back to the hotel from the airport, we heard a loud noise and felt kind of a "chunk" in the car--though neither of us thought we hit anything. Luckily we were getting off the freeway anyway, because by the time we exited and pulled off the the side, the back passenger tire was hissing like a boiling kettle and losing pressure fast. Because it was a rental car, we decided to not do anything to change the tire (and thus potentially put too much liability on ourselves if something happened to go wrong again), so we called roadside assistance and waited for about an hour before the helpful dude showed up... though no less than three police vehicles stopped during that time and offered help if we needed it.
After we were patched up and cruising down the road again on a donut tire, it was nearly midnight and "tired" doesn't begin to cover how we felt. We twisted and turned through Colorado Springs and passed the Olympic Training center along the way to the hotel... which was kind of cool, since the Olympics were in progress and many of the skaters had departed from Colorado just a couple weeks before.
Eventually Sean turned onto a road was lined with trees that sparkled with fairy lights, and which ended in the shadow of a giant buildig. The building was old, and elegant, and even at nearly midnight a uniformed gatekeeper waved Sean cheerfully through as a couple of valets and bellhops rushed to the car when we pulled under the ornate marquee--with our swank donut tire.
I looked at Sean incredulously. "We're staying here?" I squeaked. "I didn't bring nice enough clothes! Or shoes!"
Sean just laughed gently as he handed his keys to the valet. "You'll be fine," he said. "I promise."
Ladies and gentlemen, he took me to the Broadmoor. If the Broadmoor is unfamiliar to you, allow me to explain. Founded as a playground FOR the rich BY the rich (railroad barons, at the time), the Broadmoor is a 5-diamond (and 5-star) hotel backed up to the mountains of Colorado Springs. It shocked people with its $2 million price tag back in the day, but nowdays it boasts its own lake (really just a glorified pond), a golf course, tennis courts, pools, spas, a bowling alley, five restaurants, a museum, a separate Wilderness Retreat and another retreat soon to be opening, a host of boutiques and shops, and some private properties for the wealthiest guests. And they have world-class french pastries.
Designed by the same architect who did Grand Central Station, the Broadmoor pays homage to the romantic Pioneer West of the days of its grand opening with its preference for tasteful western art lining the walls, but the similarities to Grand Central Station are found in the tiled floors and the pastel frescoed ceilings.
Our room -- one of the least swanky -- was fully outfitted with hands-free technology so that you could close the drapes, turn on the lights, set the do-not-disturb, and view hotel amenities from a tablet on the nightstand. The Broadmoor is old and sticks to those pre-turn of the century roots, so the decor could hardly be called
modern. I guess if I had to put a term to it, it was... rich English countryside? Anyway, it was swank. The next day we went to exchange the rental car in favor of one without a classy donut tire on back, then headed downtown for lunch and shopping. Along the way I saw this door, which reminded me of my friend V in New York because her husband is an aspiring blacksmith. That, and it looks like something that jumped out of a Tolkien story, and V is all about Tolkien-ish stories.
On our way out of the reeeeeaaaaallllly tight parking garage, we managed to graze a pylon, putting a sizeable chunk and a smear of yellow paint in the front fender of our (recently exchanged) rental car. At that, Sean threw his hands in the air and declared that he was just going to walk everywhere from then on.
Though fender benders always put you in a bad mood, we couldn't stay grumpy for long since we were on a mini-vacation. We went back and explored the hotel a bit (and I conducted a flower photo session in the bathroom after (quietly) sawing off the ends of the stems of the flowers with the foil cutter on the room's complementary cork screw while Sean took a cat nap), and then we changed for dinner.
I was starting to feel VERY under-dressed in my black pencil skirt and jacket as we passed several women in sparkly cocktail dresses and ball gowns...but when we saw the uniformed men in the lobby in their dress blues, I put two and two together and realized we were crashing the annual Air Force Ball (the Air Force Academy is in Colorado Springs). Sean and I had a lovely dinner at the Summit Restaurant, during which we both broke our strict paleo diet that we'd been maintaining since the new year. It was worth it, though.
Afterwards, unwilling to drive anywhere and equally unwilling to call it a night, we wandered down to the Golden Bee, an authentic English pub (really. They broke down a pub in London and shipped all the fixtures to the Broadmoor--after it had a short, but glorious second life in New York. The fixtures were all over 100 years old) on the Broadmoor grounds. You might recall this pub from my previous post, "Best. Night. Ever." Suffice it to say that booze + piano man sing-alongs + rowdy Air Force personnel makes for one fun night.
The next day, based on several recommendations, we went to go see the Garden of the Gods. The Garden is something like you'd expect in the sandstone deserts of Utah, except it is surrounded by Colorado greenery. It was beautiful, breathtaking, and WINDY.
I stopped to take this picture as we first entered the park, intrigued by the forces of erosion and the weakness of the rock that somehow teamed together to create just that one hole in the face of the cliff. After I had snapped the picture and was walking away, a young boy and his family passed us. "Look!" the boy said, excitedly pointing up at the cliff. "Look! Two kissing camels!"
And for the rest of the day, whenever the kissing camels came into view, I could think of nothing else--I could no longer see it as merely an interesting geological formation.
The sun was against me for much of the shots, and my phone doesn't have the greatest camera. But one thing I noticed as I was reviewing all these photos is that I almost always was standing and taking the photo from the east facing west. And nearly all of the formations are leaning from right to left. That must have been one hell of a northern wind.
After the Garden of the Gods, we made our way to a small town outside Colorado Springs near Pikes Peak. We didn't really have any plan or goal, so we just strolled for a while, peeked into a gallery of local artists, and stopped for a cup of tea at a local coffee shop where I used the restroom and got an unexpected boost of self-confidence:
Though we had not nearly scratched the surface of the charming--and more than slighly hippy--town, we decided to make our way to Pike's Peak. At just over 14,000 feet (14,031, I think, but I'm just remembering that from the informational brochure. I'm sure you could google it if you don't trust me), Pikes Peak is merely one of more than two dozen (again, I'm just trying to dredge this out from my memory) of Colorado's "Fourteeneers," peaks above 14,000 feet. In February the road wasn't yet open all the way to the peak, so we could only go to mile 12 of 14.
It is a gorgeous ride on the way up, but once you hit the turnaround point (if I thought it was windy in Garden of the Gods, it was frankly terrifying when we got out at mile 12 and I worried about the car tumbling off the side with the gusts) and start going back down, the view is breathtaking. There's no way snapshots could do it justice, but here is some of what we saw:
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| Mile 10-ish |
And that, my friends, is Colorado Springs in a nutshell. I'd love to go back in warmer weather. It's a great place to visit. If you go, stop in at the Broadmoor, and if you're a breakfast person, the Omelet Parlor in town is a great place (seriously might have been the best omelet I've ever had in my life)... but always expect a wait!
