Gouged at the Gorge

Back to the vacation blogs...

Tuesday morning - July 17 - we awoke to head southwest to Canon City and the Royal Gorge area. It's just beautiful through that area; we turned on the CD we bought from DisneyWorld a couple of years ago with music from the ride "Soarin'" on it. It's just a majestic soundtrack, and I (scott) am such a dweeb.

Anyway, it was great fun rolling through the mountains on the scenic trip down through the Rockies. Tammy, about halfway down to the Royal Gorge, announced she didn't know we were in the Rocky Mountains. Again, much like our hostess with the mostest, geography's not her strong point.

So, we finally got down to the Royal Gorge about an hour later, and we came upon this little quasi-amusement park about a 1/3 to 1/2 mile back from the bridge over the Royal Gorge. The road just sort of stopped at a toll-gate kind of entrance.

Long story short, without going into too much detail, you couldn't even go near the bridge, more or less go across it, without paying an ADMISSION (read: not a toll, but ADMISSION) fee to this little park. The highlights of this park? A carousel, a skyswing ride (not included in the price of your admission), a tram ride over the gorge, a petting zoo, and about 493 gift shops. I don't know if they knew it, but I came to the Gorge to see it and drive over it, not to pet a flippin' goat.

So, I asked this gatekeeper what the admission price was to drive over & back. "$23 per adult, $19 per child". I'm sorry, no, you misunderstood me. I'm not wanting the admission prices to Epcot; I wanted to know how to get into the Gorge park & bridge thingie.

"$23 per adult, $19 per child."

Sweet heavenly lord.

Tammy, aka budget nazi of the midwest, informed me she didn't bring enough of our allocated funds to the park. So, I debited the sucker. Man, that hurt. Anyway, $84 later (unbelievable), we were headed over the Gorge. For those of you who know me really well, you know I'm very scared of heights. So, I was finally able to look over this wooden-slatted bridge bottom (and THAT'S comforting) by the time we came back over.

I'll be hard pressed to ever admit that it was worth $84, but the view was absolutely amazing. Just breathtaking.

One last thing in this entry...that skyswing thing - who in the WORLD would ever engage in this is beyond me. Just unreal. You essentially were put tandem (one on top of the other) in a harness and bungeed out over the Gorge.

No...why don't you just kill me? There's NO WAY I could ever do anything like that. You'd have to kill me first and then shoot my dead body out over the Gorge.

For those who are willing to make that happen, you'll have to stand in line...:)

Next - our visit to Dr. Dobson's City on a Hill, and more fun with the Happy Wanderer.