The Royal Gorge – Grand Canyon of Colorado.  World’s highest suspension bridge.  Sounds impressive, right?  The boys enjoyed it, but I was a little underwhelmed.  It may have had something to do with the fact that I couldn’t look around while crossing the bridge.  It’s a wonder I made it across at all.  (I still have a terrible fear of heights)  My first attempt ended in retreat after about 15 feet.  Nobody told me that the bottom of the bridge was covered in (what looked to be) old wooden planks and that there were GAPS between them!  The bridge is over 1000 feet above the Arkansas River and it’s 1/4 mile long!  Plus, they let CARS drive over the thing!  I was sure it would collapse while we were on it and we would all plummet to our deaths.  The boys, however, weren’t convinced.  “Hey, Mom, look at this,” they’d taunt.  Very funny.  

Guard rails are good.  Especially at 14,000 feet.  Apparently the people that built the road to the top of Pike’s Peak thought guard rails were optional.  The drive to the top is extraordinarily beautiful and I can see why it is the most visited mountain in North America.  As you drive up the narrow, winding roads you get a sense of how small you are and how hard it must have been for the pioneers crossing the Rocky Mountains.  Our books teach us that Lewis and Clark left their boats and many of their supplies behind, trades with the local Indians for horses, and crossed the mountains on horseback.  Looking across the landscape I wonder how a horse could make it across.  These are some big mountains.

Wordle.net.  I found this site recently and I’m utterly hooked.  I thought I’d pass it along, just for the sheer fun of it.  Here’s how it works…Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text, so if you list the word Driven to Educate 10 times, Driven to Educate will appear larger than the other words you’ve listed.  You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like, and I can think of lots of different things to do with them. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. Check out ours!   

With the Beijing Olympics just a month away we thought it fitting to tour the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and see where our nation’s best athletes prepare to compete.  The tour is free and if you’re lucky you’ll get to see the athletes practicing.  Unlike other countries, the training facility gets no money from the government – it is completely run off of sponsorships –like Coke, 24 Hour Fitness, and others.  The sponsors donate the things that the athletes need, like gym equipment and clothing.  Every year the top athletes, from gymnasts to basketball players to marksmen, apply for an opportunity to move to the training complex and make training for the Olympics their life.  If they get accepted the sponsors cover all of their living expenses – lodging on campus, meals, calling cards – everything.  Their only job is to focus on training.  They are also provided with the best sports medicine available, at no cost.  Doctors from around the country volunteer to do a 2 year rotation at the training center, which apparently looks really good on a resume.  The waiting list to work with the athletes is about 7 years long!