Free Time

Steve, Gene and Sheryl are the crew members remaining in the area until our station visit in Denver to take place on Thursday. We have decided after a week in Colorado that perhaps this would be great place to avoid the brutal heat of summer in our home states. The view of the Rocky Mountains is breathtaking and the weather is lovely. The thermometer will read 90, but as long as you are in the shade, you are comfortable. The sun, however, can do some real damage in the thinner air at this altitude.
On Monday, after a week on the road,there were things to attend to, like washing clothes and dealing with the financial details of the weekend. Namely what to do with all the cash we took in. The plan was to drive up to Boulder later in the day. Well, those chores seemed to go on and on. When we finished it was 4PM and we decided to postpone until the next day. For the second night in a row we dined at a Brewpub, which is part of a chain. One would not expect it to have great food, but this one does.
Tuesday the three of us made the short drive to Boulder and looked around. There were a lot of nice vintage homes of various styles that we enjoyed. We went to the airport where the guys looked at a vintage Beech 18 and we watched sailplanes soar. This was right at the foothills of the mountains. We enjoyed a bison burger at Ted's Montana Grill before coming back to pick up Peggy Fairchild from the airport bus that stops a block from our hotel.
Peggy, who wears the vintage stewardess uniform, has flown in from Jupiter, FL. She is so animated and full of fun and will add a lot to our little group. And perhaps we can talk about something other than airplanes and guns at dinner. Tonight we went to a Bistro in Arvada housed in a former gas station complete with pull up doors. A rather compact place but the food was very good. Larry Jamison had recommended it to us and he was right.
Wednesday morning we head for the hills to the west to check out two mining towns, Idaho Springs and Georgetown. Idaho Springs has a nice sized downtown with more restaurants than anything else. It also has a visitor's center with some very good displays that tell the history of mining in the area. At one shop, the lady proprietor showed us her home which she had built onto the back of the store. She had health problems and needed to sell. She had the equivalent of an urban style loft there which made for plenty of conversation later. We had lunch at a place she recommended and enjoyed the food. Then we drove a but higher into the mountains to Georgetown, which proved to be smaller, but more quaint. There is a small railroad there that hauls passengers back and forth to Silver Plume. We arrived as the last train was leaving, but got to see the departure and follow its upward progress and trip across a very small and very high trestle.
Again, we had a very nice dinner at one of the nearby restaurants, fueled the car and packed for our early departure to Denver the next morning.