Back from my two week vacation. Wow. It was a really long drive to Colorado, comprising two whole days on the road. I guess I'm not too sad to be back home, but I'll be terribly sad to go back to work.


Well, I guess I'll split my story into 3 parts: Old Places, Old People, and The Abbey.


1. Old Places:
Most of these places my parents and I visited countless times while we lived in Colorado. That of course was about 8 years ago. My brother, born in MS, has never been to the pretty touristy places that we always went to, and my parents wanted to make sure that he would. So our first stop was Pike's Peak. It's a really lovely train ride up to the top, but the train goes too fast in my opinion. The tour guide waved her hands at a group of rocks or trees or a waterfall as the train whizzed them by, and I think they could be better enjoyed in the course of a few minutes rather than seconds. One day, I will hike up the mountain and get to see and touch all those things myself.


We also went to Cave of the Winds, Garden of the Gods (a park with huge sandstone formations) and Rocky Mountain National Park. It was amazing how little of these places that I remembered. Perhaps not a bad thing, because I was just as excited as my brother. I did remember one thing about Rocky Mountain Ntnl Park--- the chocolate. At the summit, I remembered gift shop that sold chocolate covered huckleberries, and I used to get one piece and eat it on the way down the mountain. The gift shop is still there, but sadly the chocolate covered huckleberries have been replaced with chocolate bars with a thin ribbon of huckleberry syrup. Ah, the un-recoverable past. We were lucky to be visiting the mountains that particular week. We were told that the wildflowers only bloom for 3 weeks in the entire year, and we managed to be there on one such week.