tourism in the springs

So what kind of tourism should one practice?  There's the standard version - the hikes around the Garden of the Gods (yes! we made it there, at last - that is, I'd never been there before, and Alice was last there aged 5, at a long-discontinued Chuck Wagon dinner, started as a tourist thingy in 1935).  This is a pretty good view of Pike's Peak through the hole in the Siamese Twin rocks.

And then there's the research tourism.  This is the house in which Alice's grandparents lived at the time of The Scandal in the early 1930s (and her mother and grandmother carried on living there until at least 1940, according to the census).  Six or seven years ago we talked our way in, and saw the rooms that her mother would have grown up in - today, we were alarmed to see that the roof was in terrible bad repair in various places - an Ancestral Home, but what can one do to intervene?  The whole area of the Old Northend is full of beautiful houses - ones we could afford, even - but why live in Colorado Springs, unless one has to, which mercifully we don't.  Sure, Pike's Peak is stunningly beautiful - but it's a scarily self-righteously right wing place: this evening, we passed a guy on the street wearing a tee shirt with that by now very familiar Obama image - the Shepard Fairey HOPE one - made more hollow cheeked, more zombie-fied - and the lettering, rather than HOPE, read CANNIBAL.

And then there's the touching base picture.  Two years ago, I posted the image of a tin horse just up the street from where Alice's great-uncle used to live.  And two years later, I find that the same angle, the same positioning of the ears is what I go for again (I didn't check the last one earlier).  The stickers are a little faded, the flowering weeds in front are gone, the store behind, at the back of the M TEL (as the sign reads) still sells antiques and guns and "military memorabilia," and the establishment offers rooms for 2 at $38 a night.  This is a run-down and scary city in many ways ...