An autumn trip to Colorado | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Kathy Manos Penn is a native of the “Big Apple,” who settled in the “Peach City” – Atlanta. A former English teacher now happily retired from a corporate career in communications, she writes a weekly column for the Dunwoody Crier. Read her blogs and purchase her book, “The Ink Penn: Celebrating the Magic in the Everyday” on her website theinkpenn.com.

    My husband and I have a vacation to Colorado coming up, and one of my long-time girlfriends is joining us. It all started when Beverly declared she wanted to have a destination birthday party for a milestone birthday. I promised I'd go anywhere she wanted to go regardless of whether the rest of our group could make it. All was fine until she mentioned Durango, CO as a possible site.

    I had to tell her the one place I couldn't go without my husband was Colorado, possibly his favorite vacation spot. That's when I suggested she pick another destination for her May birthday and then accompany us to Colorado Springs in September on a trip we already had planned. That's all it took for us to extend our Colorado trip by adding a five-day stay in Southwest Colorado.

    We plan to spend three nights in Colorado Springs at a reunion of Vietnam veterans. Since Beverly has never met a stranger and the group is fine with members bringing guests, we'll all have a grand time. We'll tour the Air Force Academy, attend a banquet, and take the cog railway up Pikes Peak.

    Once that event is over, we'll head to Mancos, a small town in Mesa Verde Country, to stay in a cottage as our base camp for the next several days. The lakeside cottage promises a garden and mountain views.

    The next day we'll tour Mesa Verde National Park to see the cliff dwellings and mesa-top villages constructed by the Ancestral Puebloan people between 600 - 1300 AD. We'll end our day with dinner at the Metate Room Restaurant at the Lodge located within the Park, where we're hoping for a sunset view through the large windows.

    For our next adventure, we'll head to Durango to ride the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. A vintage steam locomotive will carry our passenger train through the San Juan National Forest along a railway that's been in operation since 1882. It's amazing the planning it takes to decide which railroad car to reserve. We chose the San Juan enclosed car complete with narration. After much research, we decided we'd take the bus back down the mountain rather than the train or the jeep tour. Everything we read told us that the return train or the jeep ride deeper into the hills made for an extremely long day, and we all prefer to have some leisure time at our cottage.

    Day three, we plan to tour Pagosa Springs; a town known for its hot springs, downtown river walk along the San Juan River, and nearby scenic drives.

    The next morning, we'll drive to the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park, home to one of the world's highest suspension bridges. We'll spend a few hours exploring before driving the final leg to the Denver airport to spend the night before catching an early flight home the next day.

    We think we've come up with a perfect plan. My friend gets to fulfill her wish to ride the Durango & Silverton Railway, and we get to visit parts of Colorado we haven't seen before. I predict smiles all around.

    Look for Kathy's new book "Lord Banjo the Royal Pooch" due out in late August and find her collection of columns, "The Ink Penn: Celebrating the Magic in the Everyday," on Amazon. Contact her at inkpenn119@gmail.com.