Tag Archives: Pikes Peak

Mountain trimmings

Posting here has been a little light lately, while I help make Christmas happen at home. But while there’s nothing quite like basking in the glow of your own tree, I also love traveling at the holidays—if only because I get to see how other places deck the halls, or experience different regional traditions.

Best of all (for me) is when everything is festive … inside—

—and out.

Wherever you are spending your holidays this year, I hope they find you cozy and warm—and wreathed in light.

Merry Christmas!

Front Range from the front seat

There are some roads I have traveled so often that I have permanently etched into my memory every landmark, every sign, every single geographical feature along the way. The seventy miles between Colorado Springs and Denver is one of those stretches. When I was a kid, I knew exactly how far we were from our destination by which butte we passed; the profiles of every mountain in every season; and which hill was next to appear on the horizon. Every time I go back, no matter how much farmland has been converted into brand new suburbs, the mountains never change—and my mental map gets retraced with the same lines. On this day, I sketched while the Tailor drove, but I just as easily could have done this from memory—laying out every hill and peak along the route on one long, continuous sheet of paper.

Retro Row

Manitou Springs has been a tourist attraction since the 1870s—first for its “medicinal” mineral springs, and then for its wild-west remnants and mountain location. For decades it’s been chock-a-block with midcentury motels and vintage neon—and by some miracle, nearly all of them are still around.

Every time I come back here, I run around town to do a sort of frantic inventory of these places, always amazed and relieved to find things more or less as I left them. These signs have been my old friends for over twenty years. I’m hoping against hope they’ll fare better than Giuffrida’s, and that there’s still a lot of life left in them.