Well, it’s the last day of our trip in Colorado! It always goes by so quick. Today, we started as we did a lot of days of this trip with a competitive game of Uno.
We decided to do a quick site-seeing tour of my old stomping grounds of northern Colorado Springs, known as Briargate. We drove by my first house, 8440 Freemantle Dr. Although the paint and landscaping was different, it looked quite similar to how I remembered. Then, we drove by my second house, 8810 Alpine Valley Dr. Here, the house and surroundings were very familiar to how I remember, just the vegetation had become much thicker!
After that, we were off to see my old schools. We started with my Middle School, Timberview Middle School. Similarly, not much had changed, except for some additional artwork and sculptures outside. The last stop on the nostalgia tour was my Elementary School, Frontier Elementary School. Here, things seemed to have aged a little more, but it was still kept up well. The kids had a blast playing on the kindergarten playground which, ironically, I never played on as I started there in second grade. Kendall couldn’t put her Otter friend from the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo down wherever we went today. I was really happy to see that the memorial of trees we put up in 1986 in memory of the seven Space Shuttle Challenger Astronauts that died was still there. That meant a lot to me personally. With the amount of rain in the area, things were actually much more green than I ever remember them being when I lived there!
After the touring around, it was time to get some lunch and finish packing to get to the airport. We stopped by Culver’s for some take-out and frozen custard to give us the energy we needed to take-off. With that, we got everything into our bags and rushed off to the airport. We didn’t have a lot of time to spare, so we had to say our quick goodbye’s and thankyou’s to Grandpa Roger and Grandma Cheryl and we were on our way to baggage-check/ticketing, and then we were off to our gate. At our gate, there were a ton of kids from the Air Force Academy sports camps at our gate. Gave me the thought that in a few years, we may be able to send Brian, and later Kendall off on such a trip
With little time to spare, we were on the plane, and off to DFW. We had a fairly uneventful layover, where we just had another snack. Then, we flew the rest of the way to RDU as the sun set, getting us back home late in the night. Long day, but a great trip! The kids already want to get back there soon!
