Sunday, July 26

I'm sorry for being late on this posting and my last one, but there was just so much going on. Yesterday, on Sunday, we got up early, as we were going to travel quite a bit. We headed out to Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, one of the largest and diverse fossil dig sites in the world. We watched an interesting movie on how the site was formed, and took a small hike along the Petrified Forest loop, where we witnessed a large variety of beautiful flowers, including the indian paintbrush, wild geranium, elk thistle, and yarrow. We also saw many petrified redwood stumps, one of which was as wide as at least five or six people. After our visit, we decided to head for the town of Cripple Creek, where we ate lunch. Now, here's the thing. When my mom lived in Colorado, around '68, Cripple Creek had one or two small casinos. Now, in 2009, Cripple Creek's main street is clogged with five or six casinos, each branching out into an average of about four large rooms, filled with slot machines and similar things. It's ridiculous. Anyway, we ate at a place called McGill's Pub and Platter, which was inside a casino. Therefore, we had to deal with constant, repetitive casino "music." It just kept droning on . . . ohh, it was horrible. We got out as quickly as possible, but when we did get out, it was thundering and lightning. We got in the car at the right time, because after we did, it starting hailing, hard. We took a little trip to a place where Mom and her parents used to go all the time when they lived in the mountains. We didn't see the road, "Greta Gulch", but we did see some other roads named after the wives of the men who lived there. After our side trip, we headed back to the camper, and got there around 5:30 or so. After that, we all sort of slipped into a lethargic state for the rest of the day. We ate noodles with pork and gravy for dinner, and broke into a new bag of cookies. There's really nothing else that happened, so tonight's closing will be "goodbye and goodnight" in Thai: โชคดีและดีกลางคืน!