June 17-20, 2023 | Photo Album

Manitou Springs, Colorado is a two-hour drive north on Interstate 25 from Trinidad. Our journey was enlivened by storms.

We zipped through Walsenburg, where we have stopped and stayed a few times over the years, and on past the Huerfano Butte. We stopped for a pit stop at Colorado City, where the helpful clerk alerted us to hail on the road ahead. So we delayed there for awhile to let the storm sweep eastward, texting our friends up in Manitou Springs that we would be delayed.

A tornado warning came up on our phones, so we were glad to have missed the excitement to the north. Soon enough the radar app on my phone showed me the storm had cleared the interstate highway, and we drove on through and beyond Pueblo. The clouds were still unsettled, and we spotted piles of hail on the roadside terrain.

We reached the hotel before 4 p.m. and that evening joined our friends, John and Betty, and their grandson Max, for the melodrama at the Iron Springs Chateau. It once offered a three-course meal with the show, but had devolved to snacks, so we dined on popcorn and nachos. The show was “All Trains Lead to Home…or…Training Spaces” and we dutifully cheered the heroes and booed the villains.

The next day, while our friends took Max on adventures in the area, Wendy and I had breakfast at Uncle Sam’s Pancake House…it wasn’t worth the long wait, and she was much happier with the pancakes and sausage she bought the next morning at a McDonald’s.

Miramont Castle

We drove up to Miramont Castle, which I had been wanting to see since our previous visit with John and Betty in Manitou Springs in 2019. The rambling mansion was built on the side of a mountain from 1895-1897 for Father Francolon, a French Catholic priest, and his wealthy aristocratic mother. It is a weird mix of nine styles of architecture with four levels, each with at least one exit to level ground along the mountainside, with the front door on the first level and the back door up on the fourth.

The mansion is over 14,000 square feet with over 40 rooms, including octagonal rooms, a 16-sided room, and various oddities. It has been lovingly restored, with a fire department museum in the lowest level, various odd rooms outfitted to remember different aspects of life in Manitou Springs, a gift shop, tea room, etc.

Father Francolon had moved to Manitou Springs for his health after drinking from a poisoned chalice during Mass in New Mexico. Perhaps that was because of his conflicts with Spanish priests, or because of his own misbehavior. He first built a home above the later castle, and after the castle was completed, his original home became a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients run by the Sisters of Mercy. A tunnel connected the castle to the sanitarium, through which the nuns delivered meals for the Francolons.

Francolon and his mother didn’t enjoy their castle for long, as in 1900 a lynch mob came for him after the mother superior of the Sisters of Mercy accused him of pedophilia. He hid under the seat of a buggy and was whisked away to refuge at a Catholic church in Colorado Springs, and he and his mother later returned to Europe.

The sanitarium moved into the castle when its original home burned, and it was sold off in 1946 and converted into apartments. It was purchased by the Manitou Springs Historical Society in 1975.

My impression is that overblown mansions, such as the Marland Mansion of Ponca City and La Quinta of Bartlesville, seldom stay in families for more than a generation or two. Their long-term survival, due to tax and maintenance issues, often depends on them being repurposed by tax-free religious or academic institutions. Eventually historical societies get hold of some of them, raise funds for restoration, and we get to tour them. Miramont stands out for having shifted from a sanitarium run by nuns into private apartments before finally becoming a museum.

When I was younger, I would fantasize about what it would be like to live in such a mansion. Now I’m grateful that our home is only about a tenth of the size of Miramont and is 27 times smaller than the Marland Mansion. I now appreciate having a home that is small enough that we can operate our machine for living without additional staff, and I realize that we are introverts who don’t need space to host gatherings.

Red Rock Canyon Open Space

After climbing through the castle, Wendy and I enjoyed a tasty lunch at Savelli’s, which was next door to our hotel, before driving down the highway to the Red Rock Canyon Open Space in Colorado Springs.

Almost a century ago, John George Bock accumulated land parcels south of the famous Garden of the Gods area, which is where Wendy and I stayed in 2015. The city acquired 789 acres of Bock’s parcels in 2003, which had previously been used for quarries, gravel pits, a gold refining mill, and a 53-acre landfill. The former industrial sites have been transformed into a rugged and beautiful landscape with miles of trails for hikers, joggers, and mountain bikers. The city has now expanded the park to 1,474 acres.

We only had the time and endurance to explore a few trails on the northwestern edge. The trails led past ridges of red sandstone. Those formed from sand and gravel washed down from the ancestral Rocky Mountains which spent millions of years near the edge of a sea, then formed the bottom of a shallow sea, and were slowly buried under a mile of new sediments. Eventually, when the Rocky Mountains were uplifted to the west, the mile-deep Red Rock Canyon strata were lifted up, deformed, and bent onto their ends to be eroded into what we enjoy today.

The sandy trails led around the jagged upturned strata, with rises and falls providing vistas of Pike’s Peak and nearby homes in panoramas to the west. We saw a snake and trees that seemed to grow from the rocks.

There were quite a few people out enjoying the area on a Sunday afternoon, but the size of the park kept it from feeling crowded. I hope to explore more of the Open Space on a future visit.

Old Colorado City

That evening we regrouped with our friends and drove into Old Colorado City for a Father’s Day dinner. Old Colorado City is a tiny 8-acre area on the western edge of modern Colorado Springs, which is over 125,000 acres. In 1859, it was a small settlement of El Dorado at the eastern entrance to the pass through the mountains to the west. Renamed Colorado City by four founders, it became the first permanent town in the Pikes Peak region.

Colorado Springs was a “dry” town, while Colorado City was “wet” with over 20 saloons, gaming parlors, and brothels serving gold miners after gold was discovered in 1891 at Cripple Creek. Prohibition arrived in 1914, and the town was annexed by Colorado Springs in 1917. It is now an arts district.

We dined at the Trails End Taproom and Eatery, which had been the Mason Jar when we were there in 2019 before the pandemic. Now there was a wall of beer taps, but we ordered items like peach cobber, macaroni and cheese, a salad and patty melt, and fried mushrooms.

Ad astra per aspera

The next day we began our journey home. That meant a long drive along rough Highway 24 from Colorado Springs to intersect Interstate 70 at Limon. Then it was a long roll along the interstate to Hays, Kansas, where we stopped to rest overnight.

I surprised Wendy with Gershwin done surfer style by playing for her a cover of Rhapsody in Blue by Thomas Lauderdale and Satan’s Pilgrims.

That helped pass the time, along with a train and wind farms. At Burlington, just west of the Colorado-Kansas state line, we stopped at The Farm Grill & Restaurant where Wendy enjoyed corn dogs and pecan pie while I had another French dip.

It was windy and hot driving through Kansas, which has the state motto “Ad astra per aspera” or “To the stars through hardships”. Their tourist board has condensed that down to just the first three words. Oklahoma has a similar issue with its motto of “Labor omnia vincit” or “Work conquers all”, which is another saying from Virgil, this time from his Georgics, a poem supporting Augustus Caesar’s back-to-the-land policy encouraging Romans to farm. Our tourist board gave up and uses, “Imagine that”, which is pretty awful, but perhaps better than its predecessor during my childhood: “Oklahoma is OK”.

At Hays, we loved JD’s Country Style Chicken, which featured all fresh food with chicken tenders, rolls, spicy and delicious potato salad, green beans, corn, and more.

I was surprised at having to navigate four roundabouts on Highway 183 from our hotel to drive into Hays. It reminded me of encountering a long chain of them in Bend, Oregon. I like the lone and often busy roundabout we have in Bartlesville, which is both faster and safer than the stoplight it replaced, but find that a series of them gets old pretty quickly, especially if there isn’t much intersecting traffic to highlight their functionality.

The next day we dashed home. We roused to enjoy fresh hash browns, good pancakes, and French toast at the Pheasant Run. Then we drove along the interstate to Salina, stopping at the Kansas Originals Market & Gallery outside Wilson for a nice shopping break.

I like the historical map on the wall of the one of the rest stops in Kansas. It included the Great Osage or Black Dog Trail across southeastern Kansas near where we live, which was a 200-mile trail leading east from Baxter Springs, Kansas to the Great Salt Plains in Oklahoma. Black Dog lived from approximately 1780 to 1848. He was born near St. Louis, Missouri and his village, Pasuga (Big Cedar), was located at present-day Claremore, Oklahoma. He was a huge fellow, almost seven feet tall and weighing about 300 pounds.

Next was a windy drive south to Wichita, where we had lunch at the Old Mill Tasty Shop, a feature of the Old Town there since 1932. Wendy had tasty crab salad on white bread, while I enjoyed a turkey sandwich and a delicious chocolate shake. We wrapped it all up with a 2.5-hour zigzag drive from Wichita through Derby, Winfield, Cedar Vale, and Caney to finally head south into Oklahoma and little Bartlesville, concluding our latest westward expedition.

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