It is our last full day at Pueblo today and so we decided to find the River Arkansas and its Gorge. The road from our hotel leads right up to the Gorge and we loved exploring the surrounding countryside. We found this tourist attraction over the Gorge . The Royal Gorge bridge. It had a cable car and ski lift and you could walk over it. ….We didn’t ,it was very hot and quite expensive so we took the photos and off we went.

Next stop was the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. It was very interesting. Giant redwood trees once grew in this valley and also it had been under the ocean too. I’m talking of 34 millions of years here. Volcanoes erupted and the area was covered in mud which preserved all the creatures leaves and trees. There were huge petrified tree trunks preserved by the volcanic mud.

For 200 years tourists plundered and took away fossils and pieces of petrified trees. It wasn’t until 1969 that the area was declared a national monument and preserved for the future. Now 50000 museum specimens from fossils have been recorded.

We were very hot and feeling breathless due to the high altitudes so we couldn’t walk far sadly, but we got these photos.

We headed for Colorado Springs and saw a sign for the “garden of the gods”. It was another breathtakingly beautiful place and free to visit. The red sandstone out crops were extraordinary. You could drive up and round the area of the mountain in a one way system. There were loads of parking places to stop and walking routes to view the rocks. We seemed to get another spurt of energy and wandered around. The balanced rock was amazing.

There were rocks looking like men and we saw faces on them in our imagination. All this is directly above Colorado Springs which is in the plain below. The tallest mountain is very important to the Native Ute Americans and is called Pikes Peak.

We are in temperatures around 100*f and at altitudes from 6000 to 11000 feet. We are finding it hard going and exhausting as you can imagine. “Feeling our age”!

We called in at Cracker Barrel for our tea yummy and now we are washing clothes and preparing to travel North again to Fort Collins NW of Denver. This is our last stay for 3 nights and then we will fly from Denver at 7.40 pm Denver time.on Saturday evening.

looking forward to seeing you all soon and sleeping in our own bed xxx