Well, at this time we're up in Colorado Springs (which happens to be in Colorado, natch) for an anniversary trip but it hasn't turned out exactly as we planned. For one thing, my sickness got worse and my chest was getting more congested even before we left Shreveport. The flight up no problem...probably one of the smoothest rides I've ever been on...but I found out soon that when your chest is clogged up like mine was (still is) you can't breathe very deeply...no surprise...but when you're in thin air it's even worse. On Saturday night we stayed at the Stonehaven Inn Bed & Breakfast after spending most of the day doing some site-seeing which was wearing me out. The B&B is located on the west side of Pikes Peak, in its morning shadow, at an elevation of 9,500 feet and I went rapidly downhill after we got there. It felt like the entire night I was having to make myself breathe and worked up one heck of a nasty fever which broke later that night. It was an effort to just walk to the bathroom and back. I felt like I should have been dragging a tank of oxygen behind me with the plastic tubes under my nose! I'll get into the trip a little more later but I wanted to say the B&B was a great place...good owners (from Arkansas who recently graduated a daughter from Louisiana Tech...small world) and terrific location. I'd recomment the place in an instant. I told Jonnene we'll come back soon and do this right...meaning when I'm not sick and influenced by the elevation.
So it's Sunday night now and I'm feeling much better but I'm still congested, especially in my sinuses which ought to make the flight back to Dallas really interesting tomorrow if that doesn't clear up. At least I ate a complete dinner tonight, a delightful meal of baked salmon, couscous (rice), and green beans cooked up by my niece's husband, Marc. We've stayed Friday and Sunday nights at their house here in the Springs and they've been great hosts. Marc's heading to Afghanistan in a few weeks for a year's tour with his Army buds and we hope he keeps his head down and aims straight. He's already spent 15 months in Iraq and seems...at this point to us...that he came out of it with a positive experience. He's had a grenade thrown at him and has been in "few" firefights, but he likes to talk about his experiences with the locals and how they were invited into homes to eat and visit. I felt he enjoyed being around the people there and he does smile when he talks about them.
Even though we haven't done everything we wanted to do because of how I felt, we have gotten a few things accomplished here. Twice we got to visit with a friend of mine, Ron, who lives in Manitou Springs and is manager of the Wal-Mart there. He's still a member of our local race team, Team LaS'port, and wears the uniform on his training rides in the mountains. I hadn't seen him since 2002 but we still exchanged the ocassional email and I wanted to make sure we made contact during this trip. We also met his wife and we had a grand time hanging out in a little coffee shop called Spice O' Life on the main drag in Manitou Springs. That was good.
We got to see some tourist sites like Garden of the Gods and the Cliff Dwellings. I had seen all of this when I was 12 years olds on a family vacation with my Mom and brother. The tourist spots haven't changed that much but the area around Colorado Springs has changed plenty since 1967!
More to come....I'm tired and I wanna go to bed.
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