Before heading to New Mexico Mom decide we had visit "The Garden of Gods" in Colorado Springs.....so I wondered is it time for repentance Mom? she responded that if anyone should repent it was me for chewing her cord............ooops we're still on that? I said I was sorry ok?

Just as we entered the park it started to rain heavily..........Mom, I think the Gods is trying to tell you something...........shut up she says afraid of slippery steep wet roads

Colorado Springs, at an elevation of 6,035 ft., is a city in Colorado at the eastern foot of the Rocky Mountains. It lies near glacier-carved Pikes Peak,  with hiking trails and a cog railway leading to its 14,114-ft. summit. Mom has already been to the peak and do not want to repeat that drive

The city's Garden of the Gods park features iconic red-sand red rock formations that were created during a geological upheaval along a natural fault line millions of years ago. Archaeological evidence shows that prehistoric people visited here about 1330 BC.

At about 250 BC, Native American people camped in the park; they are believed to have been attracted to wildlife and plant life in the area and used overhangs created by the rocks for shelter. Many native peoples have reported a connection to Garden of the Gods, including Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, Lakota, Pawnee, Shoshone, and Ute people

The Park is popular for hiking, technical rock climbing, road and mountain biking, and horseback riding. It attracts more than two million visitors a year, making it the city's most visited park. 

Here's a dad trying to explain for his daughters how to climb, both seemed little interested in his lesson

It stopped raining while we drove around so finally we managed to get a parking spot and took a long walk on parts of the 21 miles trails

As usual, I do get a lot of attention and this little girl was hugging and tickling me so I couldn't stop laughing

I tickled her back with my whiskers and made her laugh too

Balanced Rock presents a popular photo opportunity but since this seemed to be the highlight of the park it was very crowded so Mom took pictures from the car as we drove through some pretty tight spots.

After this visit, we continued south towards New Mexico as planned. We drove on a highway route that roughly follows the Santa Fe National Historic Trail, which is now a National Scenic Byway.

We decided to stop in Pueblo which is one of the largest steel-producing cities in the United States, for which reason Pueblo is referred to as the "Steel City".

Mom located a dogpark where we spent a few hours meeting with other dogs, but as usual, I'm more interested in chasing the ball Mom throws,

There was a huge parking lot next to the park where Mom decided we could spend the night, and I agreed it was nice and quiet and lots of green grass.

At midnight we woke up by someone banging on the car so I barked my head off trying to chase it away, and Mom called out "just a minute" it took her a second to find the remote to open the hatch and there was this security guy with a sharp flashlight telling us to move. Ok ok Mom said but the prick wouldn't stop shining the light in her face, and I continued barking at him..........he was a prick, but no point in arguing so we moved to the good all Walmart parking lot which wasn't as nice but good enough for the rest of the night

Early morning we went to the Riverwalk, which was originally home to Native Americans, trappers, adventurers, and, eventually, a thriving business district, deteriorated after the devastating flood of 1921 and the subsequent relocation of the river farther south. The Pueblo Conservancy District, which was formed after the flood to oversee the realignment of the river and the management of it, led the way to reclaim the original river channel and revive, as well as beautify, the historic tract

There are 54 pieces of recognized art along the Riverwalk with plans to add more in the future.

and here's a beam from the World Trade Center. beams from this tragedy can neither be bought nor sold.. The steel beams used as memorials are historically protected and were donated to various groups which agreed to construct appropriate memorials

We were here so early we were almost alone except these geese who left their poop everywhere, and when I tried to say hello they hissed at me

There's a boat ride along the path, which we both thought of as silly since it leads nowhere. You can launch your own canoe here though.

The swallows were showing off their expert flying skills and are so fast Mom couldn't get a picture in flight, but here's one at  his/her home under the bridge

Bullriders professional building had a cool statue 

Unfortunately, as we're driving around this was the only nice part of town, (besides the dog park) The rest of the town seemed very rundown and after a google search, I found out it was ranked the most dangerous city in CO 2018. 

The art changed dramatically and this is one of the nicest.

Leaving town continuing south Mom came across a place she has been to before.....she ate here and remember it mostly because the several toilets were sitting next to each other without walls    

But that time she didn't know about Florissant fossil close by, were beneath a grassy mountain valley lies one of the richest and most diverse fossil deposits in the world. Petrified redwood stumps up to 14 feet wide and thousands of detailed fossils of insects and plants reveal the story of a very different, prehistoric time

No dogs allowed on these trails and since Mom isn't super interested in this kind of stuff we got back on the trail going south.

Looks like there are a lot of interesting artists around here.........Mom liked this display of old bikes used as a fence

All of a sudden we get a warning about a severe thunderstorm over the radio and sure enough........it was thundering and lightning hard, so we pulled over at a rest stop and took a nap dry and comfortable in the back of the car, and Mom came to think of the struggle pioneers faced along the Santa Fe Trail. The trail was a challenging 900 miles (1,400 km) of dangerous plains, hot deserts, and steep and rocky mountains. The natural weather was and is continental: very hot and dry summers, coupled with long and bitterly cold winters. Freshwater was scarce, and the high steppe-like plains are nearly treeless. Also on this trail, there was a serious danger of Indian attacks, for neither the Comanches nor the Apaches of the southern high plains tolerated trespassers. In 1825, Congress voted for federal protection for the Santa Fe Trail, even though much of it lay in the Mexican territory. Lack of food and water also made the trail very risky. Weather conditions, like huge lightning storms, gave the travelers even more difficulty. If a storm developed, there was often no place to take shelter and the livestock could get spooked. Rattlesnakes often posed a threat, and many people died due to snakebites.

After the nap, or was it before??? doesn't matter .................we left the trail and drove along the Frontier Pathways Scenic and Historic Byway to Bishop Castle which took us over 9,200 feet above sea level .

I thought it was another church type thing because of the name, but it turned out the builder's name was Bishop
and he bought the land for the site for $450 when he was 15, and construction on what was originally intended to be a family project to build a cottage started in 1969. After Bishop surrounded the cottage with rocks, several neighbors noted that the structure looked something like a castle. Bishop took this into consideration and soon began building his castle.

Mom was put off by the many signs around

 Most of the 40 years he has worked on the castle "Bishop was engaged in a running battle with Washington bureaucrats over the rocks that he used," which came from the National Forest surrounding his property. "Bishop felt that they were his for the taking, the government wanted to charge him per truckload." That dispute has been settled. In 1996, he was challenged by the local and state government over unsanctioned road signs that pointed to the site.

The site has become a tourist attraction, and RoadsideAmerica.com devoted a chapter to the castle and rated it "major fun" and describing it as, "one man's massive-obsessive labor of medieval fantasy construction". But it also issued a "parent's alert," warning potential visitors that Jim Bishop is "a tough-talking man with strong, extreme beliefs, and sometimes he expresses them bluntly and loudly. If you and your children want to avoid potentially offensive rants (involving politics and race), you may want to steer clear.

We didn't climb on anything it didn't look safe and it was very dirty and dusty...............don't understand how they perform weddings here in all this mud

We drove back to route 50 and again south to Trinidad where we planned to stay the night, but the man at the lodge told Mom to take her mask off it's not needed it's a hoax because it's an election year. she turned around at the door because if that's the way they feel here it may not be safe ..................besides Colorado made it mandatory  

after a quick stop at the Coalminers memorial for photos, we went on to Raton 

Trinidad was first explored by Spanish and Mexican traders, who liked its proximity to the Santa Fe Trail. It was founded in 1862 soon after coal was discovered in the region. This led to an influx of immigrants eager to capitalize on this natural resource. By the late 1860s, the town had about 1,200 resident

Trinidad was dubbed the "Sex Change Capital of the World", because a local doctor had an international reputation for performing sex reassignment surgery. In the 1960s, Stanley Biber, a veteran surgeon returning from Korea, decided to move to Trinidad because he had heard that the town needed a surgeon. In 1969 a local social worker asked him to perform the surgery for her, which he learned by consulting diagrams and a New York surgeon. Biber attained a reputation as a good surgeon at a time when very few doctors were performing sex-change operations. At his peak, he averaged four sex-change operations a day, and the term "taking a trip to Trinidad" became a euphemism for some seeking the procedures he offered.

 Not sure where we land next, but it'll be south I'm sure

  Time to get going .............

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