RonnieAdventure #0323 - Colorado Springs Area 2018, Part I

It had been a number of years since we spent time in Colorado Springs; so when I saw airline tickets for $35 each, how could we not make the trip!

For a city with a population of almost 500,000 people, the Colorado Springs downtown area is very clean with lots of beautiful flowers, works of art, small shops, and very tourist friendly. It would be easy to spend an entire vacation just exploring the City without ever going up into the mountains or out onto the plains.

The old county courthouse is a beautiful structure that has now been converted into the Pioneer Museum. Unfortunately, many of the museums in the downtown area have limited hours and were not open when we were there early in the morning

Uncle Wilber's Fountain contains over 200 hydraulically powered water jets (52 of which are part of the play area and lit at night by fiber-optics), and a riddle hidden in the mosaic. Unfortunately, the fountain only operates Wednesday - Sunday for limited hours.

Picture by Mariana Wagner

The lyrics for the patriotic song America the Beautiful were written by Katharine Lee Bates and the music that we know today was composed by Samuel A.Ward, a church organist and choirmaster at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey. The two never met. (My Grandmother was a Bates, so we are probably related. There is a statue of Katharine in front of the courthouse.) 

In 1893 Bates was an English professor at Wellesley College, a private women's liberal arts college located in Wellesley, Massachusetts (just west of Boston); when she had the opportunity to teach a summer session at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. On her train trip out west, she was impressed with the western spacious skies, and as the train crossed Kansas there were amber waves of grain, and then the purple mountains majesties and fruited plains appeared as she crossed into Colorado. When she visited the top of Pike's Peak, the words for a poem started coming to her, so when she returned to the Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs she wrote a poem entitled "Pikes Peak."

In 1895, the poem was renamed "America" and published in the Fourth of July edition of the church periodical The Congregationalist. When Salas Pratt read the poem in The Congregationalist, he composed the first of over 75 melodies that were written for the poem by 1910. However, it was Samuel Ward that was inspired to write the America the Beautiful melody that we now know while he was on a ferry boat trip from Coney Island to New York City. When the tune came to him in his head he did not have any paper, so he borrowed his fiend's shirt cuff to write the tune on until he returned home.  When Ward died in 1903 he did not know how popular his tune would become.

While walking around the downtown area, the Humpty Dumpty brothers were found sitting on a building wall near the courthouse. One brother was terrified trying to learn to ski and the other brother was content playing a violin. 

The American Numismatic Association's headquarters is located in Colorado Springs and contains administrative offices, a library, and a money museum with some of the world's rarest and most famous coins. In front of the building is the Largest and Most Powerful Coining Press in the World, which was built in 1873 for the United States Mint in San Francisco.

Colorado College is a private liberal arts college that was founded in 1874. The current student-faculty ration is 10:1 and the college has an acceptance rate of only 15%. In 2018 U.S. News & World Report ranked the college as the No. 1 Most Innovative Liberal Arts School in the United States and the college was ranked 23rd best National Liberal Arts College by Forbes. Alumni include a Nobel Prize winner, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a MacArthur Fellow, 14 Rhodes Scholars, 31 Fulbright Scholars, 68 Watson Fellows, 18 Olympians, and 170 professional hockey players.

The Colorado Springs Olympic Training Center is located on the former Ent Air Force Base campus and has been home of the U.S. Olympic Committee since 1978. The other two Olympic Training Centers are located in Lake Placid, New York, and Chula Vista, San Diego.

Colorado Springs was selected for a training center because its high altitude is believed to improve training effectiveness. Victoria, a member of the US National Skeleton Team, gave us a tour of the facility because she was not in training during the summer months when there was no snow to practice on.

The US Figure Skating Museum and Hall of Fame contains a history of skating and many of the costumes worn by skaters during the Olympic events. Sonja Henie and Karl Schafer were two of the initial people inducted into the Hall of Fame. I remember when I was growing up and trying to learn how to ice skate, my Mother always talked about the skating abilities of Sonja Henie and Karl Schafer; but this was the first time that I ever saw a picture of the couple. 

Picture by Bil Bunderarchiv

The Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun is located on Cheyenne Mountain above the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. It is not easy to follow the road up to the Shrine because the road runs through the zoo property. When I pulled up to a gate blocking the road and inquired about the fee, I was told it was $40 for two people. Rather shocked, I told the attendant that I did not want purchase the Shrine, I just wanted to visit it. The attendant was not amused and said that we had to purchase zoo tickets in order to visit the shrine, so we left. (This was the only bad experience we had during our Colorado Springs visit.)

Picture by Matt Wright

Photographer Unknown

On day we had lunch at 6,075 feet aboard a Boeing KC-97 Stratofreighter aircraft. Below is a photograph of the actual KC-97 when it was in active military service and refueling two jet fighter aurcraft. 

Photographer Unknown

Also located at the Colorado Springs Airport is The National Museum of World War II Aviation that contains a number of WW II displays and aircraft. 

1939 Grummam F3F-2 Carrier-Based Fighter

1948 North American T-6G "Texan"

1945 Republic P-47D Thunderbolt

Grumman TBM Avenger

1943 Republic P-47D-2RE Thunderbolt

Republic P-47D-2RE Thunderboldt Serial 42-8089 was excavated from a pit on Papua New Buinea in 2000 and returned to the United States for restoration to flying condition. 

Republic P-47D-2RE Thunderboldt Serial 42-8089

"Wandering Wanda" was the nose art of a B-24 10th Air Force aircraft in the China-Burma-India Theater that flew mission over "The Hump." Beginning November 1, 1944 a campaign was made to destroy the Japanese rail lines in Burma, with emphasis on the 688 bridges that were constructed by 13,000 POWs and 80,000 to 100,000 civilians. The railway was unofficial named "The Death Railroad." By April 1, 1945, 98 bridges had been destroyed.

In the book/movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, the wrong bridge was identified. The bridge in the book/movie was actually on the Mae Khlung River. It is believed that the bridge on the Kwai river was destroyed by the "Wandering Wanda" B-24 crew.  

(To be continued next week.)