Day 10 - A Bridge Too Far (& TOO High)

Freezing start to the morning, but by 9.00am, the sun was out & everything heated up.

After a leisurely morning, we headed out for the Royal Gorge Bridge & Park. We had booked our tickets on line & upon arrival felt pleased with ourselves that we had saved $8 each on general admission. Our smugness was slightly diminished when we informed that the gondolas had been suspended due to high winds. I was secretly pleased.

The Royal Gorge Bridge is 955 feet above the Arkansas River, 1260 feet long, 18 feet wide & made up of 1292 planks. Most incredibly is that it was built in 1929.

As we approached the bridge, my bum went funny & my legs turned to jelly. Jackie strutted around without a care in the world. Eventually I managed to take a couple of photos & even attempted a selfie, which was bloody awful.

We successfully reached the other side & went to the Theatre where we were shown a film about the construction of the bridge. The builders were utter lunatics with not a safety rope or harness in sight. For someone trained at ‘Working at Heights’, I was shocked.

We had a wander round the park, scoffed at the idiots doing some sort of bungee ride, then realised the gondola was now working - oh joy. As we walked up to the gondola station to get a ride back over the gorge, I had to stop for a nervous wee. The gondola arrived at the station & a parks employee cam elite to say that they needed to suspend the gondola operation because the wind had got up again. I was half annoyed, but also half relieved.

As a result we had to walk back over the bridge. We had lunch in the RV & monitored the gondola, but it didn’t start up again. Matters were made worse when I realised that I had forgotten to wear my Fitbit again.

After lunch, we drove down into Cañon City, we drove past the Colorado State Penitentiary, which had a museum, but it didn’t take our fancy (Not enough notorious inmates). I have since read that Cañon City prospers not so much from tourism as from prisons. It has a dozen prisons, including a top security superman prison with 500 of the nations most dangerous including the Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols & Al Qaeda ‘Shoe Bomber’ Richard Reid. Amazingly we didn’t see the other eleven.

Instead we drove up & down Main Street. We didn’t feel the need to stop & get out so we drove 8 miles south to Florence an old historic oil town. It was much more attractive than Cañon City & was full of Antiques Shops. We went to the Rocky Mountain Bank & changed a $5 note for 25 cent coins.

On the way back we stopped at Pathfinder Park for a photo of John Charles Fremont, The Great Pathfinder. We arrived back at our KOA campsite just after 3.00pm, realising that we were were in a different time zone, presumably when we crossed into Colorado the previous day. We loaded up the washing machines & dryer with our dirty clothes & 25 cent coins, then just relaxed in the sun in our camping chairs with a couple of beers.

We did have a couple of disasters that evening:-

1. We snapped off the catch on the window beside the cooker whilst trying to let the cooking smells out.

2. Whilst watching the rest of After Life, I ‘clumsily’ knocked my glass of red wine off the table onto the seat & all over my shorts. The red wine didn’t stop there, it dripped down into an electric panel, which set an alarm off and lights to start flashing. Luckily they eventually stopped & we had 18 dishcloths.

FITBIT = 5,507 steps / 2.56 miles

Song of the Day - Vertigo by U2.Read more