Picture the scene: I’m sitting at my computer desk early on a Thursday morning, listening to a collection of hit songs from my childhood. Out of nowhere (well, out of my computer speakers), Lipps, Inc. starts telling me I gotta move on. But move on to where? Why, to Funky Town of course! Trouble is, I have no idea how to get there. I checked with Google Maps; it doesn’t know, either. So I got to thinkin’…what’s the funkiest town I know? How about a city that, when offered a state university or a state prison, chose the prison? And what if that city misspelled its own name for decades, before the United States Board on Geographic Names finally allowed them to use a Spanish letter in their name? Yeah, I guess that’s kind of funky. So that’s where I’m taking you today!
Yes, though its name has always been pronounced “canyon”, the spelling was officially “Canon City” for several decades, because the gringos in the U.S. government wouldn’t let them add a tilde. The Feds finally relented in 1994, and this funky town has been known as Cañon City ever since.
That said, if you find yourself visiting Cañon City, you’re not there for the city itself. You’re there for the Royal Gorge and/or Skyline Drive. Or maybe the state prison museum. This is actually quite an interesting museum, and is housed in a former women’s prison. But I undress digress. On a fine spring day in 2013, I made my way to Cañon City, to the mouth of the Royal Gorge. Here I walked the Tunnel Drive Trail, which goes 2 miles up the gorge – not nearly the full length of the gorge, but a very enjoyable walk nonetheless. It starts like this…
So if they’re gonna call this thing Tunnel Drive Trail, it’s gotta have a tunnel, right? Nope. It has three. To be fair, though, the first two tunnels are so short they maybe shouldn’t count. But, hey! I wasn’t there to take a tunnel census. I was there to take pictures with my new camera. I was still getting used to this camera, so I took quite a few experimental shots of / through / into / out of the tunnels. Only a few were worth sharing, and here they are…
And now we reach The Big Tunnel. Again I took quite a few experimental shots; these are the keepers…
Beyond the tunnels, there is absolutely no shade whatsoever. So I hope you applied your sunblock before we left the car.
(you know you wanna click this one)
I had been on this trail once previously, and remembered the trail ending at an old bridge that didn’t look very safe. Apparently that bridge has been replaced…
As you can see by the last couple of pics above, the sun was setting by the time I finished this walk. But I was not done for the day, no no! I still wanted to get over to Skyline Drive to try out the new camera in twilight. Check it out…
OK, now that we’ve seen the road itself, let’s look at what you can see alongside it, and looking down from it…
You may have noticed that a couple of this weeks photos are captioned to entice you to click them (“click this one for sure!” and “you know you wanna click this one ”). I did this because these were my favorite two pics in today’s post, but I felt like the image preview didn’t do them justice. This happens frequently, due to the blog software deciding on its own how to crop each photo. Let me know if you find this useful. If so, I’ll try to call attention to the best two or three pics in each post, since I know most people don’t click through every single photo. TTFN! (Trying To Find Norm)
Voyages with Parkinson's 