My last post of 2011, can’t think of a better way to wrap up the year than with a recap of what I hope could be my future home someday: Colorado Springs.

Colorado Springs was my last stop after driving nearly 3,000 miles for nearly 2 weeks all over the Rockies. Out of all the places I’ve traveled to, this was the place that seemed to hit that sweet spot between rustic and modern convenience. I could see why it was such a popular place to live. The climate is dry, it’s sunny 300 days out of the year, close to Denver’s international airport, and with an incredibly large commercial sprawl that offered even the most obscure retail chains. Annnnnnnd, they have Del Tacos! Just… perfect.

Entrance to Garden of the Gods, with Pike's Peak looming in the background.

I only had three days to spend and there was a lot to see, but I am REALLY glad I had the presence of mind to visit the Garden of the Gods. Majestic rock formations (akin to the shape of stalagmites) are sprinkled throughout the area, including a circuit of roads and walkways covering every nook and cranny that virtually every inch of the park can be explored by foot or car.

Wow, it really IS a garden!

From there I head off to Pike’s Peak, deciding to forgo taking the Cog Rail in favor of some scenic driving. Unfortunately the peak drew in a lot of snow recently, so the last 9 miles were closed to drivers. I went up as high as I could anyway, until finally running into a friendly park ranger who was guarding the close-off point. Sweet lady too, who had an amusing interest in visiting the Adirondacks back in New York, mountains I had now regarded as girlie hills after having experienced the Rockies in all its glory.

One of the best views of Pike's Peak is right near the tourist center.

Despite not being able to reach the summit, I could still hang out at the tourist center, which is adjacent to one of the reservoirs near the peak. Dude, seriously, If I could go anywhere in the world during my lunch break, it would be here. Five minutes looking at the mountains and all the problems of this world just seem to melt away. Sigh.

Can you guys hire me, please? Please? Mommy?

Coincidentally, Denver (and Colorado Springs to a lesser extent) have the largest concentration of federal workers outside of Washington, D.C. Being a government stooge myself, I always suspected that if I was ever going to find a way to move out here, it would have to be through the Feds. Wonder if the FBI has an X-Files division out there too. I just know I’d be perfect for that assignment. O:-)

But alas, I can only stretch the umbilical cord so far before it reels me back in, and after a crazy but truly awesome two week adventure, I had no choice but to return to New York.

Some day, I’ll be back though. Only this time I won’t leave. Some day… some day… maybe in 2012?

Koko and Bobo enjoy one last look at Pike's Peak

After three days in Telluride it was time to pull anchor and make my way to Ouray, where I’d spend another three days of mountain bliss before hightailing it to Colorado Springs.

Telluride is literally only 10 miles from Ouray, that is, if you don’t mind jeep trekking through Himalayan-like terrain to get from here to there, otherwise it’s a 50 mile 1+ hour drive by car.

I opted to go south so I could swing by Mesa Verde and visit the cliff ruins, then take a quick peak at Durango before finally settling in at Ouray.

The San Juan mountains seen driving south from Telluride. So purdy.

It made for some gorgeous driving too, so much that I really had to make a concerted effort not to keep stopping all the time. Eventually the terrain started to flatten out and I reached the Mesa Verde park, thinking my time here wouldn’t amount to more than 15 minutes of gawking at the ruins. Um, not quite.

The entrance to Mesa Verde

After I got the map from the park ranger at the entrance, my jaw dropped when I saw it would be a 20 mile drive just to get to the FIRST site. 20 miles!??!!? Uggghhhhhhhh…

I was already here though, so I bit the bullet and continued to meander WAY up there, where the roads hugged the cliffs and swung sharply in all directions. The views were so hypnotic I had to slow to a crawl at times lest I find myself driving right into open space.

Eventually I reached the core of the park, stopping occasionally to look at some of the Pueblo pits that were still preserved, and taking pictures of the Cliff Palace that could be seen from the distance. Unfortunately you have to take a guided tour to visit the site, but there was another set of ruins called the Spruce Tree House that was self-guided. Works for me.

Spruce Tree House from a distance

Getting down there was pretty easy, the walkway was well paved and located behind a tourist center/museum. It’s a steep incline though, so be prepared to heave and ho when you have to walk back up again. Oy.

Where's the mall?

Even though I spent MUCH more time here than I originally planned, it was fascinating to walk through these ruins and imagine a life without iPhones, cable TV, pizza and indoor plumbing. On the upside though, at least eHarmony didn’t exist either.

I finally left and cruised onward until I arrived at Durango for lunch, the site of the famous Durango-Silverton Railroad too. Unfortunately those train rides literally last 8 hours round trip, so I never did get a chance to take a trip while I was close by. Ah well, gives me something to look forward to for next time.

Someday, baby, someday...

Durango seemed like an average modern town that just happens to enjoy close proximity to the San Juans, with the usual stretch of national retail stores and food chains. Pretty clean too, at least compared the crap towns I usually see on Long Guuuyland. There was no compelling need to stick around after lunch, so I continued north and onward until at long last I arrived in Ouray.

I have to say, as far as taking a lazy drive goes, this is probably one of the best areas of the country to do it. The only thing missing is the beach, but since I hated the beach I wasn’t missing anything at all really.

I don’t doubt that I’ll be able to return here in the future, but I do pray that the next time I visit, it will be to stay for good.

Mountains as seen midway between Durango and Ouray. Excuse me sir, is that cabin for sale?

After leaving Salt Lake City, my new itinerary would now bring me through Moab and sneaking back into Colorado towards Telluride on a little known highway.

The road to Moab. Under no circumstances should your car EVER break down here.

I quite literally drove through a desert for hours, wondering how the pioneers of old had ever managed to travel through territory like this on horseback without losing their minds. I was REALLY glad now that I didn’t try to hoof it to the Grand Canyons as the monotonous drive alone would have put me in a coma.

Eventually things began to get more colorful, as the terrain became rockier and redder in tone until I finally saw the signs for the National Arches and pulled into the entrance.

This was just the entrance into the national park too.

I had only discovered the Red Rocks of Denver the week before, but the National Arches made that experience akin to prancing around the backyard of a skanky trailer park home. This wasn’t a park: it was a visit to another world.

Whoooooa, I'm on Mars, dude!

One of the wallpapers I use for my Windows desktop was a picture of the famous Delicate Arch, considered to be one of the greatest natural attractions in the world. In a million years I never thought I would come so close that I could actually see it now with my own eyes. I just needed to do a short hike to find the arch. And by short hike, I mean this:

Can you see my car? It's that weeeeee little blip right there in the background. BTW, this was when I was only halfway through the hike. Yes, really.

Wkipedia says the hike is 1.5 miles long. Wikipedia lies like a dirty, disgusting lying liar from Liarsburg. There is no WAY that this hike was only a mile and a half long. Just… no.

I would walk up the hill, reach the top, only to find another hill even steeper than the previous one waiting for me. So I would walk again, and walk, and walk, and climb, then start crying. And cried I did. Well mostly it was a lot of wailing. Good thing it was the middle of the day because I would have attracted a lot of coyotes here.

Just one more turn.... just one more turn... just one more turn...

Yep, I’d be walking alongside the cliff like above, turn, only to have to walk the full length of the cliff again. This hike was literally taunting me now. I cried some more, but finally, after about an hour of stumbling, gasping, praying and shaking my fist at the sky, I made one more turn…. and there it was.

Absolutely gorgeous, but don't trip here, or you might roll off the side and plunge to your death. 4 ralyz.

You can actually walk as close to the arch as you’d like, but I didn’t dare risk it. My knees were really fatigued then and there’s a steep incline here where it’d be easy as pie to trip and roll down right past the arch and into the vast emptiness of space. Fortunately there are plenty of places to perch and just enjoy the views. It was so strange to be here, like I had landed in Oz, just trying to make sense of the alien environment around me.

I couldn’t stay though, as I still needed to be in Telluride by sundown, so I trekked back down for another hour until I finally reached the car and wept for joy, much to the unease of the tourists and hikers that were near me. I cranked the A/C to max and contented myself with a lazy cruise around the park.

Petrified sand dunes at the National Arches. Don't they look like dino droppings?

What amazed me about the experience here was that you could look in every direction and not see one minute inkling of civilization anywhere for 1,000 miles, and yet the town of Moab was quite literally only 10 minutes away, hidden away behind a conglomerate of canyon walls. So strange, and yet, so awesome.

I stopped for gas and then finally moved on to Colorado. From Moab there’s a modest highway that will take you right across the border, but amazingly enough the terrain continues to put on a show. I drove from Highway 46 to where it became 90 in Colorado, and from there it meanders adjacent to a huge valley of canyons that glittered a rainbow’s worth of vibrant colors as I passed through.

The picture does not do it justice. Colorado is glorious no matter where you go.

Afternoon was slowly turning into night, but fortunately I had already made it deep into the San Juan mountains to offset any fears of accidentally driving off a cliff due to the baffling lack of guardrails. My goodness.

But I arrived alive, and at long last I could finally take a much needed reprieve from all the driving with a 3 night stay in Telluride.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

The title of this post is actually a spin of last year’s title: I HATE VEGAS (and BlogWorld Expo Sucked, Sort Of)

What a difference a year and a city makes, eh?

When I attended BlogWorld last year, it was actually the first time I had ever been to a conference (other than job expos that is.) See, me being a government stooge, I am hence not important enough to my employer that I should attend seminars, conferences, classes or indeed any form of training that could actually improve my skillset. Although to be fair, it wouldn’t have been logical anyway, since my job doesn’t really require a skillset to begin with.

So I was basically a weenie conference virgin, having no clue what to expect, and worse yet, what I was expected to do. Needless to say, the experience in Vegas was something I hope not to repeat in this lifetime.

But… this time I was sure things would be different, as I had now had the experience of attending a few more conferences after Vegas (including SXSW), and as a result gained a deeper understanding of how they operated, and how to make the most of them. After a year’s time I would finally get my second chance with BlogWorld in the City of Angels.

But first, Venice Beach!

This is where my iPhone bit it too...

I went straight from the airport to Venice Beach… actually no, I went straight from the airport to In and Out Burger, THEN to Venice Beach. I wanted to cram as much sightseeing as I could my first day here before BlogWorld started, so the net result was a whirlwind of an afternoon driving up and down the coast near L.A.

So I’m on Venice Beach now, snapping shots with my iPhone when I feel a tickle at the back of my neck. Thinking it’s an L.A. sized mosquito about to suck half the blood out of my body, I instinctively slapped my neck… and my iPhone goes FLYING.

All I could do was watch as it glides through the air like Icarus to the sun before plunging down into the cement. Then bouncing three or four times.

I immediately picked it up (after I screamed for a good long while) and initially it seemed to be fine. I had it protected in an Otterbox case and there were no scratches or apparent damage. I looked to have dodged a bullet there.

Well, not quite… but more on that later.

So I walk back to my car… and there’s a parking ticket. I’m gone what, 5 minutes? I’ve been in L.A. all of what, 30 minutes? And already I get a ticket?

Stupid, stupid parking signs. I got thrown off by the fact that there were so many of them, and never noticed the parking sign telling me I had to PAY like 100 yards away from where I parked. One sign said 30 minutes parking, then the one after it said 2 hours parking. I should have looked further, allllllll the way down the block to see the parking meter, but I never saw it. Blah. $60 down the tube, and I hadn’t even checked into my hotel yet.

Ok, fine, whatever. I drove further up north to get a peek at Santa Monica (unable to stop though because unlike Venice Beach, you need actual coins to park here), and kept going until I reached Mulholland Drive.

Mommy, Mommy, look at me, I'm on Mulholland Drive! Wheeeeee!

I paid the price for that little detour though, as it was now after 4PM, which meant once I was back on the main roads, I would soon experience L.A. rush hour traffic in all its glory.

Fortunately I’ve been hardened by the experience of driving in rush hour traffic in both Long Island and New York City, so in the grand scheme of things, L.A. traffic wasn’t THAT bad in comparison. Still, I’d rather perform a hernia operation on myself using a wooden spoon than go through that experience again.

I finally made it to the Westin, checked in and met up with all my BlogWorld buddies later in the lobby.

You know, it occurred to me that I hardly have any pictures from BlogWorld itself. Weird. I guess because it’s so people oriented, while my focus is more about the atmosphere around us. People are more or less the same, but the environment we’re in is always in a state of change and flux. I guess that’s why so many of my photos never have people in them.

I am mindful of that though, so every now and then when I’m taking pictures I try to be a bit more inclusive:

Koko poses in front of the Hollywood Sign. Who says I'm not a people person?

Actually I think another reason why I didn’t take a lot of photos at BlogWorld may be due to the fact that my iPhone went crazy. I was taking a morning drive before a seminar took place, when suddenly the antenna no longer functioned. I lost my GPS, cell signal, even Wi-Fi. Suddenly I’m on a strange highway, I have no idea where I am, and it’s time to start panicking. I wound up somewhere in Pasadena where I finally had the good fortune to find a Starbucks, fired up my iPad on the free Wi-Fi and then started my desperate search for an Apple Store. I found one just down the road in Glensdale, and after chatting with a sweet Genius Bar girl, she had me up and running with a brand new iPhone 4S, complete with an iCloud restore all at now cost to me. Apple = WINNING!

I had several gigs of apps though, and because it required Wi-Fi to restore everything, I still had to make do without a lot of them for the next few days, since I just didn’t have time to hang out at the Apple Store all day waiting for all my apps to restore. I had a conference to attend!

In hindsight I wish I had stuck around, the hotel’s Wi-Fi was so awful I would have gotten better results jacking my iPhone up to a 2400 baud modem. Sigh.

I did eventually get back into the swing of things though, attending some of the Travel and Tourism track seminars, and discovering somewhat to my amazement that I actually recognized and personally knew some of the people sitting on the panels now. They either told us things that confirmed what I already knew (such as using a media kit for pitches, what associations to join to network with other bloggers and PR representatives, etc.) and things I didn’t know, such as the best apps to use for multimedia storytelling (Hollywood in Your Pocket turned out to be one of my favorite seminars for this reason.)

I also met and talked to some really great people, people like Liz Strauss (who hugged and kissed me like I was family) and several other established voices in the blogging industry. Even at the expo, I was running into people I already knew and corresponded with online, even the guys who built the theme I use for my blog. This was no longer a stranger in a strange land experience for me anymore. I was now legitimately a part of this world.

I handed out my wooden nickels, attended dinners, seminars and and dialogued with as many travel bloggers as I could find (at least the ones who didn’t run like crazy when they saw me coming.) All in all, BlogWorld, LA for me had become the very polar opposite of BlogWorld, Las Vegas.

I still had a city to see though, so in between getting my iPhone replaced, attending BlogWorld LA and getting tagged with parking tickets, I still found time to see the best of what the California had to offer.

Griffith Park Observatory: Two Parts Awesome, One Part WIN!

I had time to visit Griffith Park, which incidentally is also one of the best places to see the Hollywood Sign unobstructed, as well as downtown L.A.. I was truly marveled by the contrast between the panoramic views of pollution free Denver in Colorado and the smog that blanketed the region here. And I was told the pollution wasn’t as bad as it used to be too. Wow.

I was also surprised by the experience of seeing Hollywood Boulevard for the first time. Considering this is where all the red carpet shows take place, I was expecting a bit more… glamour? Or perhaps, a spotless, glittering street of gold if you will. Instead it looked and felt grimy to me, something akin to the experience of walking down Times Square before Giuliani cleaned it up. The streets smelled of faint sewage, while celebrity look-alikes and solicitors for bus tours relentlessly, and I mean RELENTLESSLY try to get you to anty up your cash. Grauman’s Theater looked old and not as well kept as I would have imagined, while a crowd of teenagers camped out across the street from the theater anxiously awaiting the next red carpet show.

When it comes down to it, it really is just a sidewalk.

Downtown L.A. turned out to be a much better sightseeing experience for me, beginning with Disney Hall with its jagged, steely architecture, to the meandering walk around city hall, where at the time they were still protesting in front of the court buildings over the Michael Jackson death trial.

LOL

This was also before the Occupy Wall Street crowd got expelled from the grounds too, although I have to admit the OWS folks here are a LOT more mellow than the ones I’ve seen at Zucotti Park in New York. They were even selling paintings and tie-dyed t-shirts. Peace and free love, man. I can dig it.

I knew I should have bought stock in Bass Pro Shop when I had the chance.

I also had the opportunity to visit the old and new Parker Center, and being an avid reader of Michael Connelly’s books, this was a real treat for me, especially on seeing a lot of the events in the book regarding Parker Center’s move was actually based on real life.

The Old Parker Center, still in use but no longer the HQ of LAPD

From there it was a few minutes walk to where the new center was, definitely impressive in scale and look compared to the old. I felt like I already knew the building too, having watched so many episodes of The Closer and Brenda Leigh Johnson’s hilarious attempts to adapt to the new Parker Center and all its quirks. Yes I know she’s only a fictional character but let me dream here.

Home of Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson's Major Crimes Division, thank yoooooou, thank you alll so muuuch!

Having now seen as much of BlogWorld and the city of L.A. as I could within the span of a few days, I had one thing left on my list that I wanted to see: Simi Valley, home of the Ronald Reagan Library.

Whoa, am I back in Colorado???

Driving to Simi Valley drew worthy comparisons to the drives I’ve taken in Colorado: sweeping views of canyons, trees, mountains and valleys swirled all around me as I cruised to the library on Ventura Freeway. The library itself was spotlessly kept, a museum built on a generous portion of land and providing a panoramic setting that surpassed even that of Griffith Park’s Observatory. The exhibits made me nostalgic for the 80s, complete with boxy looking computer terminals on Air Force One that even our iPhones today could now easily outperform.

A piece of the Berlin Wall glimmers in the California sun.

After finishing the museum tour and taking a casual walk outside, I finally came across Ronald Reagan’s grave site. I remember when he passed away how deeply I wanted to visit his grave and pay my respects, but I never imagined that I would ever find the time or the opportunity to visit him in California. But now, 7 years later, here I was.

Godspeed Mr. President. May your infectious love for our country continue to live on in all our hearts.

My trip to California was over. I left for New York on a rainy and cold morning, sad to leave, but hopeful that there will be another time where I would visit the region again.

Koko sits in reflection by the window. Will there come a day when he might visit L.A again? Stay tuned...