Colorado Springs

On the river road

I left Moab and Utah and headed towards Glenwood Springs, but still with no GPS! I sort of memorized the route in my head, the exit numbers etc and set off. Luckily there were quite a few signs towards the end of the trip pointing me in the right direction. I decided to take the "River Road" out of Utah onto highway 70, as I was told the scenery would be awesome.

Eventually the awesome scenery turned into really sparse wasteland, and for the first time I thought "man I'd be fucked if I broke down here". I also went past this really sketchy town called "Cisco" with a whole heap of abandoned buildings and derelict equipment. I wanted to take some photos of it but thought it wasn't worth the risk!

Landscape started to look like this...

On highway 70 it was all 75 MPH (which means you can get away with about 130-140 KPH). As I got close to Glenwood Springs it started to rain. However by the time I arrived it was drying up. Glenwood Springs is actually a really beautiful town, pity I was just using it as a stopover on the way to Colorado Springs. After doing my laundry (one of those constant annoyances while on the road) I went headed to a bar in downtown. I had a few drinks with a couple of locals (who were nice enough to buy me some shots after finding out I was Australian), I went back to the hotel bar. I then got drunk with the hotel staff (bartender gave me free drinks as it was a slow night), where I met one of the reception staff. He was an architectural engineer, but since the GFC has had to resort to checking people into hotels. It was pretty funny to hear these guys talk about the other staff, who had slept with who and who they were trying to hook up with at the time.

After securing myself a late checkout from the desk, I went back to my room at about 3 AM.

More of the river road.

The ride to Colorado springs was pretty uneventful, I went through some small towns and up a mountain (presumably part of the Rockies). Had to stop and check I was on the right track once or twice as my iPhone was still kaput. Unfortunately there was little open that day, so I had to get lunch at pizza hut.


I arrived at "Bill and Mary's" place, who were a couple nice enough to put me up for a few nights. Bill used to ride Harley's and had even built a few trikes out of VW Beatles. Mary was away for most of the time I was there as she was busy house sitting in the mountains.

Bill and Mary lived in "Old Colorado Town", which was supposed to be the capital of Colorado before that honor eventually fell to Denver. On the main street (Colorado Ave) there were lots of shops and a few bars in buildings that looked very old fashioned. This was done on purpose to keep the place a tourist attraction, in fact when some of the buildings burnt down in a fire they had to be rebuilt in a similar style as to keep the look consistent. Bill also told me that this part of town was fairly seedy back in the day, bars used to run up one side of the street and brothels on the other. There were underground tunnels that interconnected the two sides so that politicians didn't need to run the risk of being seen walking into a brothel.

One of Bill and Mary's cats

Bill was nice enough to take me out to dinner a couple of nights, including a Greek and a Mexican restaurant - both were pretty good! Bill was also able to accept some mail packages for me including my now fixed netbook, my American Motorcycle Association membership and my real license plate!

In Colorado Springs my priority was to sort out my iPhone, so a couple of days were spent dealing with that. So I first took my phone into the Apple Store and waited for a Genius Bar appointment. I have to say I was pretty impressed with the service, this was an Australian bought iPhone, but because I had AppleCare the staff were more than happy to replace the phone with a brand new one. The problem with this is that you lose a bit of stuff in the process (iCloud doesn't backup everything - namely non-iTunes bought music). Lucky for me I had the foresight to bring all my mp3s across to America on my portable harddrive, so once I got my new phone back home I just resynced it with iTunes that I installed on my netbook.

Unfortunately for me (and Apple), the new phone had battery issues - it kept randomly powering off. So I tried to do the right thing and upgrade the software on the phone first (part of the recommended steps on the Apple website to preform before visiting the Genius Bar). This completely failed, and resulted in phone needing to be restored, which took forever because the Internet connection I had wasn't that fast and I had to resync my music again. So after a very frustrating 3 or 4 hours, I had a phone back on the latest software... But it kept powering off randomly. This was pretty much what I expected, I've been around this stuff long enough to know that the issue was hardware related. I was just trying to follow the process properly, as I didn't want to be arrogant about the whole thing. But knowing that this had a very small chance of fixing the problem was the most aggravating thing, as it took up a whole lot of time.

Packing up to leave, shows the chaos that I live with.

So I took the phone back to the Apple Store, where they were happy to again replace the phone. They told me not to restore from iCloud as this may have been the issue (which I thought was unlikely, more probable that the phone had battery issues - from some googling I found out that this had happened to a lot of people, sometimes there are just bad phones like with any mass produced product). So the same process followed, come back in half an hour so the phone could activate as unlocked. So I come back later, turn the phone on and get a sim card error. Turns out that they forgot to start the activation process! So now this phone is useless, so they give me another brand new iPhone 4S and tell me to come back in half an hour.

View from the top of Pikes Peak

When I came back that time, yes it finally worked! I then spent an hour in the Apple Store mooching their high speed wifi, downloading all my apps etc. My music would have to wait until I got to Parker. So now I'm officially on my 4th iPhone 4S (the 64 Gb one, so not cheap for Apple to replace), but I tell you what, I'd still have an iPhone. They are seriously that good, I've never had technology that is so capable (the Navigon GPS app is fucking unbelievable, camera is pretty good as a replacement point-and-shoot, alien blue app helps me pass the time in bars on those slow nights) and so aesthetically pleasing to use. And despite all the issues, the Apple customer care was still pretty top notch. But hey, you get what you pay for.

Rock climber in the Garden of the Gods

So despite all my dramas, I did manage to get a few touristy things done in Colorado Springs. I rode up "Pikes Peak", a 14000 foot mountain. You have to pay to get onto the road, but everyone told me it was a must in Colorado Springs. The road was very recently sealed all the way up, thankfully, as there were a lot of tight hairpins that would have been pretty tricky on the bike in dirt. The ride was pretty good, but unfourtunately there were lots of drivers, all doing the speed limit of 25-30 MPH. This was excruciatingly slow for anyone on a motorbike (especially a sports bike). But the views were pretty spectacular, aside from a bit of obsforcation from the bushfire smog.

I also went to the "Garden of the Gods" national park, which had a lot of red rocks. Unlike Utah though, there were paved paths and lots of tourists. It was definitely more family friendly, kind of difficult to get photos of a lot of rocks without people in them! But it was interesting to see the rock climbers, especially when when the thunder started and they all scurried down.

Garden of the Gods

Balanced Rock at The Garden of the Gods (note: tourists).

Some of the bar locals said I should go check out "Graffiti Falls", officially "Rainbow Falls" but notorious for being heavily graffitied. So I rode up there and walked around, didn't see that much graffiti but upon looking at photos online I don't think I walked far enough. It was getting pretty dark by that time though.

Graffiti Falls.

That's it, fuck this was a long one.