So, let’s finish our anniversary yesterday before moving on to Pikes Peak. We had a lovely dinner at the Cliff House in Manitou Springs. Dinner was delicious….I had sea scallops and my honey had pasta primavera. They brought us a lovely plate of strawberries and cream for dessert. It was a wonderful anniversary!
Today, Sunday, we got up earlier than we needed to for our trip to the Cog Railroad up to Pikes Peak. When we got the directions from GPS, for some reason it gave us directions to the station on the top of the mountain, not to the station at the bottom. As a result we thought we had a one-hour drive when in actuality it was only 12 minutes. So….we got to the station at about 6am, about an hour before the staff arrived. Obviously we had no trouble finding a parking spot so we just hung out in the car until it was time to leave on the 8am train.
The ride up the mountain was beautiful. Here’s a pic I took from the train.
The summit is 5 feet higher than it was in 1965 when I visited it the first time. Now it’s 14115 feet above sea level. It took an hour to get up there and we spent about 50 minutes at the summit. That was plenty of time for photos, a trip to the gift shop and a stop in the cafe for a little snack.
You might be wondering what makes these donuts world famous. Well…we wondered as well and asked one of the workers. Apparently it’s impossible to bake at that altitude so someone came up with a recipe and developed an oven to successfully bake these donuts. We were told that if we were to take them back down the mountain, they would be as flat as a pancake because of the change of altitude. We thought about trying it but they were so delicious we ate them both at the top.
After we descended the mountain we drove to Denver (about 90 minutes north) and visited the Molly Brown House Museum. The movie “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” with Debbie Reynolds is one of my favorite musicals. The house in the movie is much larger than the real house but it was still very beautiful.
The following video is my favorite number from the Unsinkable Molly Brown. The story goes that the production was running out of money and the producers wanted to cut this number. But Debbie loved it and told them they had to keep it in. The producers agreed but only if they could get it done in one take. So, they did. Apparently the two male dancers with Debbie near the end of the number collapsed in exhaustion when it was finished. Believe me, there is no ballroom in the real house. In fact, the entire building could fit into this ballroom.
We thoroughly enjoyed our self-guided tour of this beautiful house. When we finished we headed straight to our new flat in the suburb of Wheat Ridge. It’s a basement apartment and is lovely. Tomorrow we head to the Air and Space Museum. The other two things we wanted to do, the Coors Brewery and U.S. Mint, aren’t open so I’m not sure what else we’ll do but I know we’ll find something fun to keep us out of trouble. I’ll keep you posted.