New to Trippin’ With Stanley Who is Stanley? Well, Stanley is our RV! He takes us all around the U.S. to taste delicious craft beers and meet new friends along the way. We work from the road, Brian is a graphic designer and I am a...
Austin = hashtag epic, hashtag awesome
As I type this I sit on a beautiful outside patio on S Congress at a coffee bar called Jo's. I am surrounded by Mac Book Pros and I can almost see all the tweets swarming around my head. I am sure...
Sedona I'm glad I got to knowya! Here are some pics from our time in Sedona. We stayed with our good friend Brenden and his girlfriend, Britta, in Cottonwood, about 20 minutes from Sedona and Jerome.
They were the most excellent...
Golfing and Hashing in Phoenix We had plans to meet up with our Nu friends Bill and Debbie in Phoenix after we left our troubles in Tucson. Maria was able to convince Debbie that it would be a good idea for all of us to go golfing...
B-C-Yess In between our stops in Quartzsite we made a detour to Tempe to visit my friend Kevin and enjoy a long weekend of sports. The main reason we wanted to be in the Phoenix area was that the BCS National Championship...
While making our way from Longmont to Fort Collins we drove through the small town of Lyons. We were originally just looking for a spot to buy some of Oskar Blues famous Pale Ale in a can when we stumbled upon a pinball museum of sorts.
Lyon’s Classic Pinball is essentially the house of a pinball enthusiast who turned it into an arcade. There were over 35 pinball games from the 1960’s to 2000 with such rarities as the world’s largest pinball machine and the only three tiered pinball game made.
We had a blast playing the only two player (versus) pinball game where you stand across form each other and try and send balls to your opponent’s side.
One of my favorite’s was the Disc’s of Tron (based on the game played in the movie Tron) video game that had to be one of the first games to try and use 3D video projection that would make dizzy if you looked at it too long.
After some retro fun we were on to Fort Collins via Estes Park. Maria had looked up a cool dog park in Estes with three different sections and a swimming area. When we arrived we were excited to see that they had a mini obstacle course for dogs. Our immediate thought was “Oh, Ernie would love to do this!” Turns out Ernie wasn’t interested, but Buddha picked it up right away. After a couple of times showing him how to go up and down the ramp he was running the course like a pro.
As you can see he had trouble with the last jump, but we just wrote it off as a prejudice obstacle.
After a great time in Colorado Springs we packed up Stanley and headed to Cañon (pronounced Canyon) City. We arrived at what appeared to be a run down parking lot, but was in fact the RV park we had booked. There was a range of campers from Class A buses that were past their prime and broken down trucks that had simply set up a tent and a tarp. We were informed that most of the residents lived there term and we were more than a little nervous about being the outsiders.
After spending most of Thursday working while Maria ran some errands we were excited to go white water rafting through Royal Gorge on Friday. We had gone rafting this already summer in Switzerland so were interested to see how Colorado compared.
We were lucky to get a private raft with one of the more veteran guides. Our guide Johnathan had grown up in Canon City and educated us about the history of the gorge which included a lot of gold mining, railroad building, prison labor. The whole tour took about 2 hours to travel 8 miles through plenty of class 3 and 4 rapids while executing fancy moves like the “S” move high side shifts. About half way through we pulled off to the side and Johnathan showed us a good spot to go cliff jumping. We spent about 10 minutes swimming and jumping off rocks into the Arkansas River.
By the end of the day we had learned a lot about the gorge, the region, and rafting in general. We had also both developed lop sided sunburns as we were facing the same direction the whole way down. It didn’t take much discussion to agree taht the rapids were more intense than Switzerland and decided we needed a beer to celebrate. We hit up the McLellan’s, the local brewery, but were disappointed when their nut brown ale was neither brown nor an ale.
With the Canon City experience completed we were off to our next destination, Breckenridge.
Hey everyone, thanks for checking back in. Brian and I had a great time in CO springs and the surrounding area. We arrived on Tuesday and are leaving today. I would have liked to stay longer, but there is just too much more to see and do. We’ve posted some pics on Facebook and have now downloaded a new plugin so I can link them in right here!!
Thanks for visiting… wish you were here with us!
“Bristol Brewing Co, Seven Falls, Garden of the Gods, Manitou Springs and Trinity Brewing Co.”