Colorado 2012-Day 2

Once again, we got up way to early. Because everyone's internal clock is messed up with the hour difference time zone, we all got up at 5 a.m. instead of 6. Grumble grumble. We ate breakfast, people showered, we all got ready and we headed out to Colorado Springs. The night before we ordered tickets online to Cave of the Winds. We didn't have a printer so our first stop along I-25 was the FedEx place, which we found out bought out all the Kinkos. She set us all up and for some reason their server did not work with Yahoo. It thought it was malicious and blocked everything. So the girl said, oh, send it to me through your phone and I'll print it for you. Thank god for smart phones. A few min later we had our printed out tickets and a random act of kindness from a stranger. We asked her what we owed and she said it was on the house because of the Yahoo problem. We hopped in the car and headed towards the cave. Hwy 24 in Colorado was interesting. Had to be careful on it, it's not taken care of very well. Most of the roads in Colorado suck. We got to the turn off and the road was very windy. We got to the top, parked the car and got out. We headed towards the building. There wasn't very many people due to the weather and the fact it was winter. We had to wait about a half hour until the group ahead of us came back.



Our tour guide was Brandy and she was very nice. We were the only people in our group. She started off by giving us the history before the cave. How it was discovered, the names, years, significances. We learned about each section of the cave, all the different formations and names.





At one point, she asked if she could turn the lights out. We were totally on board. First she showed us an old school lantern and then wanted us to experience total pitch black. The darkest areas you will ever experience are in a cave or at the bottom of the ocean. Once the lights were out she said to look around and even wave your had in front of your face. You will not see anything and if you do you are hallucinating. It is your brain's way of trying to see something while in total darkness. Even after 30 seconds of the dark you started seeing things. She turned the lights on and we continued on the tour. It was around a 40 minute tour. It was pretty incredible these amazing creations are still around. She thanked us and we got our picture she took at the beginning of the tour. From there we went to Manitou Cave Dwellings, similar to the ones we saw in southwestern Colorado Summer 2010. These ones weren't as remote. We ate lunch, walked around the gift shop and looked at the dwellings.





It got colder. We wrapped it up and headed over to the Garden of the Gods. Awesome rock formations. I wish we could have spent more time here.







From there, we tried to go see Seven Falls, sadly it was frozen and not worth the $9 dollars per person. It was around 4ish and we decided to head back to Aurora. Traffic started getting bad. There was a bad crash up ahead that messed up traffic for a while. Then it snowed. We got back before the bad rush hour started. We were happy to be back to the apartment. We made dinner, showered, watched some shows and went to bed.

Tomorrow: Cleaning...