Day 34/35 Colorado Springs, Colorado

The last two days have been very interesting.  Yes the fires are right here in this city and we can constantly see smoke from them.  When we were riding into town yesterday, we could see the smoke rising above the mountains many miles away.  The smoke was blowing in the opposite direct from us so it did not affect any of our cyclists.  We rode into the Olympic Training Center where we had a tour of the entire complex.  First thing we did when we got to the complex, however, was eat lunch in their cafeteria.  It was everything you would imagine an Olympic training center’s cafeteria would be.  It had all different kinds of food from which we could choose. As we walked around, we saw a couple of athletes still there training.  Most of the athletes were home to visit with family for one last time or already overseas.  The few athletes we saw were mostly wrestlers and boxers.  It was still cool to see real life Olympic athletes training right before our eyes.

After more tours and pictures, we headed to lodging which was a dorm on the campus of Colorado College.  I say dorm because that is the term that they used, but it was really a Victorian House with a bunch of rooms in it.  Supposedly this is how most of the “dorms” were set up on campus.  It was multi-level and had a lot of really cool rooms inside, and on the main floor there was a game room with a pool table and then a common room with beanbags and a huge TV where we watched movies at night.  Dinner that evening was at the house of the President of Colorado College who has been sponsoring this dinner for many years.  He was unfortunately unable to make it, but still had his staff make us dinner.  Everyone said it was a shame that he could not be there because the memories they have of him are hilarious. We got to go out that night around the town because it was yet another college town. This time we were by the campus of both Colorado College and Colorado University at Colorado Springs, which is a branch of CU-Boulder. 

                    

Our day off may be the only day where we have no sponsored events at all.  We had the entire day to ourselves to do whatever we please.  In the morning, some of us did laundry to get it out of the way.  I had not done laundry in forever so I had a lot to do.  It feels great to have clean clothes again.  After lunch, we took a van to see the Air Force Academy.  Because we were going to see the campus and the grounds, I can now say I have been to nine different college campuses on this trip.  The night was ended with a big game of ultimate Frisbee, which was a lot of fun.  Not much going on here in the city of Colorado Springs because of the fire, which is a shame because there is supposedly a lot of fun things to do in the mountains that are closed.  But it was a pretty cool city all in all.