Been a few days since the last update here…
Sunday morning I drove from Avon, to Salida, through Pueblo and back up to Denver… Just to avoid the passes which the Toyota doesn’t do well on… About 400 or so miles.
Then Sunday afternoon Aryntha, Rai, and I decided that it’d be fun to go out and do something… We wind up taking my car (it has AC *and* four doors) and end up in Colorado Springs for dinner then back to Denver… Another 200 or so miles.
So Monday I drive Wolf to Boulder, then head north of Boulder to the old Beech Aircraft facility to get some pictures… I spent several birthdays playing with the HP mainframe, watching them test the tanks for the Shuttle, and other things there and I thought it’d be neat to have some photos of those memories. So I did that (got a tour of the place from the last Beech guy there) then returned to get Wolf and drive her back home… Another 200 or so miles.
Today I drove Wolf back to Boulder again… See, she works at NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and doesn’t have a car just yet since the last one I gave her got stolen…
Well, besides NOAA being on the same campus as NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and that in and of itself being about as cool as space travel, it’s also right close to the “Flatirons” (a series of rock formations I will explain below) and offers ample opportunity for hiking adventures.
So today after I dropped her off at work I made for the hills, camera in hand…
Off I went and hiked up to the top of the hill that NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) sits on… Truth be told I was also looking for another one of these towers that we look for, called “Boulder Junction”. Well, the tower isn’t there anymore, but I did get a good hike out of the deal.
Those rock formations are the Flatirons… Basically huge sheets of rock that have been forced up at an angle from tectonic motion.
Along the way back I ran into a herd of mule deer who didn’t really seem to mind me hanging out with them and taking pictures, so I did. There were two bucks, two does, and three fawns all together. This photo shows one of the family units and their twins. In the background is south-east Boulder. As you can see I was about, oh, 20 feet from them and they seemed content to ignore me.
Once I made it back down I got a chance to poke around a bit at NIST which is where the master clock is… They broadcast the time from this clock from a transmitter in northern Colorado which is received by my wristwatch: which was showing the same exact second as this wall clock…
So, that was my day pretty much. About another 100 miles of fun in the traffic…
So, about a thousand miles so far this week… Not bad for a car that doesn’t work all that well.
And the chances are good that I’ll be driving to Boulder again tomorrow…
