The end is in sight...

As Simmie mentioned in her last post, tonight is the Olympic women's gymnastics all-around competition, so I'll be posting again while she and Melissa watch and scream. (At the gymnastics, not at my blogging.)

Yesterday we drove from the Grand Canyon to Santa Fe, where we visited Pecos National Historical Park. We were originally going to go to Bandelier National Monument, but we were running low on time and Pecos was closer. As we walked into the empty visitor center, the park ranger handed us a laminated guide (labeled "RETURN TO NPS") and invited us to go into the theater to watch a brief informational video. It turned out that the "theater" was a room with ten chairs and a few carpeted stairs, facing a 15" TV on a table. We were the only three people in the theater.


Then the ranger pointed a remote at the DVD player and began the film, which I'm pretty sure was made in the late 1980s -- the narrator was a British woman with a very deep voice, and the video featured men in various goofy costumes, from loincloths to suits of armor that seemed to have been purchased at Party City. The video began with extended aerial footage of what was presumably some kind of land near Pecos, and ended with an extended metaphor about the different kinds of shoes that have walked through Pecos. As for the park itself, Simmie had it dead-on: it wasn't exactly bad, just not particularly remarkable after all the other parks we've been to. The fact that we only encountered one other visitor the entire time we were there implies that we're not the only ones who have made this judgment.

Today we headed out early to go to Denver. We were going to go on a tour of the U.S. Mint, but apparently you have to reserve a tour spot in advance, and by the time I realized this everything was already full. So instead we decided to stop by Colorado Springs on the way to Denver -- but first we went to a Cracker Barrel for brunch! I had never been to a Cracker Barrel, which seems to be part of the quintessential American experience, so I was very excited to finally check that box off my bucket list. (Up next: Dairy Queen!) Here's me playing the peg game while we waited for our biscuits:


According to the peg game, I am "purty smart"!

(A side note: the only paper map we have used this entire trip is the Cracker Barrel map that Melissa picked up a couple of months ago. It's a really good map!)

Okay, enough about Cracker Barrel. After brunch, we drove to Colorado Springs, where we toured the U.S. Olympic Training Complex. You may have noticed that Melissa and Simmie kind of like the Olympics. Here we are pretending that we actually accomplished something:


Then we went to the Garden of the Gods, also in Colorado Springs, which has enormous flat slabs of rock sticking hundreds of feet out of the ground. That was also cool.


Okay, I'm about to fall asleep so I'll speed up a bit. After Garden of the Gods we drove to Denver and went to Casa Bonita for dinner. Casa Bonita is advertised as a Mexican restaurant with "live entertainment" consisting of cliff-diving, dancing gorillas, cowboy shootouts, and some other bizarre things I'm forgetting. It sounded like the perfect kitschy cap to an evening. It wound up being pretty depressing, though; the extremely voluminous crowd of patrons consisted of two primary types:

1) White trash families: a man with a crew cuts and neck tattoos, a bleached-blonde woman in a tube top, and their five noisy, unsupervised children.

2) Hipsters who were there ironically.

I guess we fit into the latter category, although not quite perfectly enough for us to fully enjoy the experience. Here's Simmie and me after dinner (and after I discovered that three out of three toilets in the women's room were not functioning):


And now we're back in the hotel, and Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson just won gold and silver, so I'm going to go to bed.