Colorado Springs - Day 5

It was another beautiful day in the Springs (as the locals seem to call CS).  This morning we visited the Pioneer Museum.  It was one of the nicer small scale museums I've ever been to.  It's located in the old court house, a beautiful building.  It's free and they even had a scavenger hunt check sheet for the kids to do to keep their interest. 

The original bird cage elevator was really cool!

I love the old and the new in this picture....Benjamin with the stereo viewer and Johanna with the ViewMaster.

In front of the old court house is a statue of Catherine Bates, the author of America the Beautiful.  She looks out to a beautiful view of Pikes Peak, at the top of which she penned the words to the famous song.

After a lunch break back at our suite (for people and stuffed animals).......

.....we headed out again.  We had driven by the Current Factory earlier in the week and I wanted to go back.  It's nostalgic for me, because as a child I went door to door and sold products from the Current catalog.  I earned a good deal of money and bought my first 10-speed bicycle.  I don't even know if they still do sales like that.  It was fun to see what they had in the outlet store.

Then we headed to Garden of the Gods again.  The kids had a blast climbing and running along the trails.  I love hearing, "ooh, cool!" or "oh, wow!"  We have not tired of seeing all the beauty around us this week.

For dinner, our friends had invited us over.  Our families go way back.  My dad grew up with Lonnie in Japan in the 50s, and when my family moved to Japan in the 80s, Lonnie was there with his family.  So our families have known each other for four generations now!  We enjoyed visiting with them and Ami especially took a liking to Grandpa Lonnie.  We think Grandpa Clark will be jealous.  :)

This week has been a blessing all around.  We're looking forward to one more day!