I can report that as I write this the temp is in the 60s and it’s a pretty nice evening here at the Air Force Academy. About 12 miles away as the crow flies it’s snowing on top of Pikes Peak and the temp is in the 20s and snowing. Glad we’re not up there this evening.

Today we got a sort of late start; Connie had a bad night sleeping and has been having some on and off (mostly on) tummy issues. We’re pretty sure it’s just due to the altitude; she hasn’t got full blown altitude sickness but is having some of the symptoms which start with headaches and on and off nausea. We’re continuing to do what we want to do; but between that and the thin air it’s just slower than usual.

We did get stuck by the bank robbery on the base as we left this morning. Just as we got to the gate they closed them and weren’t letting anybody out. Talked to the guard and apparently an alarm had gone off at the bank on base so they were restricting leaving until they found out what kind of car the robbers were driving. We had a good laugh with the car next to us since we were clearly too old to be robbers and they had 4 kids in the car…besides, everybody knows that robbers have masks and guns…the gate guards didn’t find this amusing at all. After about 15 minutes they opened the gates and let us go…we never did find out what happened but there was nothing on the news and no additional armed security when we got back 3 hours later…so we decided it must have been just a false alarm. Darn, we always wanted to be in the middle of a bank robbery, guess we can’t check that one off the bucket list.

By about 1100 or so she was feeling better so we headed off to our scheduled thing for the day which was a visit to the Wild, WIld, Wild West Festival in Pueblo, Colorado about 45 miles form here. Pueblo is about 2000 feet lower in elevation so we pretty quickly could tell the difference in breathing as we headed south. By the time we got there it was noonish and getting up into the 70s so we wandered around the festival awhile. It turned out to be very little in the Wild, WIld, Wild West mode and mostly just another street festival. Connie was all up for quarter horse demonstrations and cowboys and shootouts and the like and what you got was funnel cake, turkey legs, snow cones, and lots of cheap but overpriced trinkets. Bummer.

We parked in a 2 hour free parking space a couple blocks from the festival, wandered around for an hour or so, had lunch and decided that we had enough street festival. It was getting pretty warm by that time (1300 or so) and Connie was running out of gas so we left, hopped in the car and came home.

We were really tired (not much sleep last night for Connie and Neil was worn out from just living today…so we had a nice siesta in the afternoon. After that we got up, had a wine cooler, and made a nice dish out of left over rotisserie chicken from the Commissary, some leftover sauce made from Mushroom and Roasted Garlic Campbells soup and a little wine, and some noodles. Added some cheesy garlic bread using the last of some rolls we got the other day (as you can tell, it was pretty much a leftover kind of dinner) and it tasted pretty good. We’re having bread pudding with strawberries on top for dessert a little later.

Sorry no pictures today; there wasn’t anything worth it. We did see some nice young ladies dressed up in old west saloon girl costumes (saloon girl was a nicer term for available woman back in the day) wandering around trying to drum up business for the photo studio…but then they opened their mouths and all had down home Virginia accents with a real Southern Bell attitude…which sort of clashed with the saloon girl outfits. We were too hot by that time to bother with pictures though.

Cyas.