The promised grand opening didn’t seem promising. We couldn’t see a park from, the road was still under construction, and who ever heard of an Old West park? But the road opened, the planners did a bang up job on the play town, and there’s a hand pump feeding a waterfall of sluice boxes. I can’t wait to thrill a grandkid!
“We scouts raised enough money to stay on Grand Mesa for two weeks. The Mesa is the highest flat-topped mountain in the world. It’s beautiful country; forests of blue spruce, ponderosa pine, and aspen with flowery meadows in between. The flat top collects rainfall in three hundred sixty lakes and a zillion marshes. Those wet-lands make for a whole lot of hungry mosquitoes, but we scouts were tough. After two weeks of eating the fish that ate the mosquitoes that feasted on us, we were all blood brothers, and there was no mystery left in the circle of life.” Thought […]
My revered ancestor, Aud the Deep-Minded, had nothing on the five-year-old girl who attended my Viking presentation at the Penrose Community Library. Freya’s parents had their hands full keeping their busy one inbounds through 40 minutes of adult-level Viking history, but when I asked for questions, Freya popped up with one of the best questions I’ve ever gotten from an audience. “Why aren’t they scary anymore?” Whoa! All that fidgeting, didn’t keep her from listening…and thinking. Fortunately, I knew the answer: Vikings took the Atlantic by storm because they had better ships and weapons. When they invaded other countries, took slaves, formed alliances, and fraternized, others picked […]