Historic Colorado City

It’s hosing with rain here and the thunder and lightening is pretty full-on. I’m currently in a pub in “historic Colorado City” which is basically a suburb of Colorado Springs. I’ve spent most of the day outside a café/bakery slowly working through my school homework and doing the associated questions I have to turn in on Monday but now the rain has driven me inside. It’s quite funny how the locals act when it starts raining. It’s obviously such a rare occurrence for them. Colorado City is not a bad town but like a lot of towns here there’s not the retail presence that you would see in a main street in New Zealand but rather the odd knick-knack store etc indispersed with food and beverage outlets like the pub I’m currently in. Everything else is in a mall by all accounts. It would be a shame to see this happen in New Zealand especially the small, independent stores that have been wiped out.

The other thing that got to me today was the sheer number of noisy motorcycles – Harley Davidsons and their ilk. Continually roaring up and down the main street, destroying any suggestion of peacefulness. Probably only 5% were wearing helmets too. Interesting concept. These days I wouldn’t consider bicycling without a helmet and yet there are also plenty of cyclists without them as well.

Speaking of cyclists there appears to be quite a large population of cyclists here and by an account in the paper today this is getting larger by the month as petrol prices increase. Be a good time to own a bicycle shop I’d say. Especially one that had a good range of commuter style bicycles stocked; a niche that typically gets overlooked. I visited a fantastic bicycle store yesterday in northern Colorado Springs and spent probably half an hour with the owner chatting about its setup and running. She’d initially selected its location based upon the fact that there was an existing cycle track right beside it and it was there that she needed to go to the toilet when riding the track out of town. Consequently her shop has great restrooms. She also has the obvious shower etc for staff but also a washer and dryer so they can do their laundry during the day if they get wet etc on the way in, in the morning. They have 5 full-time mechanics and 3 part timers. It was a huge place but she says it’s only mid-sized by US standards.

I rode up to Criterium via town where a gathering for bicycle week was going on. Most impressive was the guys on the trials bikes – no seats! They also had a bike mechanics race where they had to reassemble a bike that was in bits and then ride it around a course. It was run and supervised by one of the instructors at our course. Riding home I went via Garden of the Gods, which is a city park filled with huge red rock formations that people try to climb. Not quite as impressive as Arches National Park in Moab but not bad all the same.

One thing about the rain – it has chased away all those damn motorcyclists.