Garden of the Gods

After spending the night in Raton, New Mexico (in a room with a broken A/C, which meant not much sleep!) we continued our trip.  The stop Neal planned for that day was at Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs.  This place is beautiful!  We started off the day with a short movie that showed how the rock formations began and also gave a history of the park itself.  Meredith, our history buff, loved it! After that, we drove to a spot where we could do a short hike, while stopping in a couple of places to see the rock formations closer up!

Balancing Rock - very cool!

Next up: our first "hike" of the trip.  We did Siamese Twins Trail, which was a nice, short hike. 

The girls wanted to take our picture, this was us trying to help Jillian actually get us in the frame. Looks like she would have done just fine without us being silly!

Finally up to the Siamese Twins Rock formation - look at Neal's happy "I am near the mountains in the cool air in August" face!

Jillian and I climbed up on top of a big rock but Meredith was a little nervous to join us, until we started being silly....

...then she joined, too (still looks a little uneasy, though!)

Because of the similarity in these rocks and the fact that they look joined, the got the name Siamese Twins.

Peeking through the opening between the two rocks that join the rock formations.

Another happy Neal shot!

Again, Jillian climbed up the bigger rock to join Neal for the pics and Meredith stayed below....until they got silly!

And then she made an appearance!

Look at that view!

We staged this photo and then a park ranger told us we were too far off the path!  Look at us being risk-taking hikers!  Unfortunately, being the really experienced hikers we are, we didn't bring our map, so we didn't know how to stay on the actual trail.  So, at this point, we just turned around and went back the way we came up! Lesson learned!