Manitou Springs Trip

With a lot of options made more difficult by the ongoing COVID situation, we have been looking at trying to find additional things around here to keep us busy.  I have been wanting to go to Manitou Springs for quite a while and never have been.  So we decided to head down that way and see what it was all about.  We didn't really know what to expect but we did find the tiny town tucked away in the hills near Colorado Springs and we immediately ran into some sort of outdoor fair.  We quickly parked the car and hiked over to see what it was all about.

It had a solid Boulder vibe to it with community activities like these soap rings to make bubbles with and tons of local artist tents selling paintings and photographs and jewelry type stuff.

However, we were not prepared for the local emotional support emu to make an appearance.  The boys were absolutely fascinated by this thing and had to go in for a pet.  Quite amazing!  After a while, we decided we were melting in the sun and heading back to the car to go try to locate what had been marketed as a "Penny Arcade".  We almost gave up trying to get there due to some horrible traffic getting through this tiny town, but we searched on and to the kids' disappointment with their bag of pennies...no real functioning Penny games were available once we found the Arcade.  They did have plenty of older, grubby, classic arcade games that we played for a bit but not quite the experience they had hoped for.  All in all, this made for a pretty fun day trip to somewhere we hadn't been before.  Next trip, we would like to arrange for a hike up the Manitou Incline but currently you have to have reservations to go and we didn't think that far ahead for this trip.