The Springs

Since our last post in Wyoming we headed down into Colorado. We stopped in Colorado Springs at the Air Force Academy. The first evening there, the rest of the family went on a bike ride to the BX/Commissary while I stayed home. This turned out to be a pretty good idea, because the first thing I heard when the girls got home was what a HUGE hill they had to climb and how Dad is soooo mean and how it wasn’t fair that I got to stay home. This put me in a better mood since I was actually kind of bored staying home.

The next day Dad and I took another college tour, this one was at USAFA. The first stop was at the air field where we got to see some gliders from the Soaring program. These were pretty cool. They get towed into the air and then released and are able to glide for up to six hours! The next thing we saw was a training room for the Jump program. The room had all sorts of equipment to prepare for jumping out of planes. They also had a wall with pictures of situations that most jumpers would not prefer to run into. Looking at these kind of curbed my interest for free fall but we’ll see. Our last stop was “the Hill”, which is pretty much the entire cadet area. The first thing we saw was the Cadet Chapel. The Chapel is the largest tourist attraction in the state of Colorado! It was pretty sweet. It had Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Buddhist churches/temples. After that, we took the normal college tour: classrooms, student area, library and dorm rooms. I must say that the dorm rooms were probably the nicest dorms I had seen to date. So, overall the biggest thing I learned was that the Air Force has it easy! No offense to all you USAFA grads. After the tour I went to meet Dad (who had ditched me after the Air Field) and Mom at the gym to watch some Army vs. Air Force boxing. Unfortunately Army failed to represent, but it was still fun; and I enjoyed listening to dad reminisce about his boxing career as a cadet.

The next day we woke up and got ready to tailgate for the Army vs. Air Force football game. This led us to realize that we had virtually no Army gear. So Mom, Toley and I headed to Fort Carson for some last minute shopping. During that time Dad moved the RV to the field to get a good spot for tailgating. By the time we got there the place was packed! It took us about 15 minutes to drive the 50 yards to the spot. Our tailgate party wasn’t the grandest ever, but it was fun. Dad’s old roomy, Homer came to hang out as well. He actually came up with the clever idea of doing some cut and paste with the GO AIR FORCE BEAT ARMY signs to read GO ARMY BEAT AIR FORCE. So what if they were blue and white! The game itself was a bit of a disappointment, although not altogether unexpected. The Black Knights started off well and kept it close the first two quarters and then they fell flat on their faces, losing 35-7. Oh well.

We spent the next few days with old time friends. We hadn’t seen them in nine years after we met them back in Indiana. So it was really cool to see them. Mom is going to write another friends blog, so I will stop there. We also got to go to “Focus on the Family,” where we took a tour of the place and got to go to Whit’s End and have a Wodfamchocsod!

Then on Wednesday Dad decided to take me to run “the Incline” after our friend Rob, who is the assistant coach of the USAFA lacrosse team, told us he was taking the team. Now, the Incline is a mile long stair, which at the base is already 6,500 ft and rises to 8500’! This altitude makes it a little tougher to climb and the fact that the stairs aren’t much of a staircase at all doesn’t help. It’s really a mile of railroad ties from an old tram that gave rides to Pike’s Peak. So, since I never really have much of a say in these things, off we went. It ended up not being that bad, my dad did it in 31:45 minutes and I did it in 34:50…………I am trying to think of a good excuse for being slower than my old man, but I can’t come up with anything good. After that we ran the three miles back down. Nothing like another character building experience.

Sincerely,

ZMan