Chapter 4: You’d Better Cut The Pizza in Four Pieces Because I’m Not Hungry Enough To Eat Six.
We took our time coming down off of our mountain high, stopping at a few overlooks here and there to give the brakes a rest. By the time we made it to the Crystal Creek Reservoir, we were all getting hungry (despite our donuts and Heavenly Cheetos earlier) and decided it would make a good spot for lunch.
A dam on Crystal Creek forms the reservoir, which in turn provides a popular recreational fishing spot with Pikes Peak serving as a dramatic backdrop to the area. There’s a small visitor center and gift shop as well as some hiking trails nearby. All in all, it’s the prettiest dam site on the Pikes Peak Highway.
Lunch, if you’re not familiar with our road trips, consists of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. This is the primary menu item because it’s portable, it’s cheap, and you can generally make it last several days even in a hot car. Between free hotel breakfasts and PB&J lunches, this helps extend the budget so we can make the trips last a little longer and hopefully see more sights along the way.
The downside, of course, is that we all get sick of PB&J after a while. But that wasn’t an issue yet.
We ate our lunch and enjoyed the view, and then we made our way down to the water’s edge. It was such a beautiful spot that we decided to do a little family photo shoot here. As you all know, in the social media age it’s very important to capture those perfect family photos so everyone will be convinced that your family is always happy, always smiling, always beautiful and never, ever has any issues concerning temper tantrums, cranky exhausted parents, cranky exhausted babies, and/or flatulence.
The 3 big kids:
Hard to believe we had just driven to the top of that mountain back there. We were able to corral Baby Drew long enough to get him to pose as well.
And the beautiful shiny married couple. We kept our sunglasses on so you wouldn’t see the bags under our eyes.
And now, here’s an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of those perfect family photos.
But hey, it’s all worth the effort.
Christmas card?
Ok, I think we’ve all seen enough of the reservoir. We can go about our business. Move along.
After what felt like an inordinately long bathroom break, we finally left and were back in Colorado Springs. The next stop was
Garden of the Gods, a Colorado state park featuring several large red rock formations on the northwest side of town. Because it a) seemed very crowded, and b) the baby fell asleep in the van, we ended up just doing a quick drive-through.
This is Balanced Rock, near the south entrance. Sorry, no photos of us pretending to hold it up on our own. I’ll try and do better next time.
And…that was it for photos until we reached the other side of the park. We found a space at the Visitor Center, where we checked out the building in shifts. Julie took Sarah and Scotty inside first while David and I sat in the van with the sleeping baby. Rule #1 of Parenting: Never, ever wake a sleeping baby.
Rule #2: Carry Ny-Quil with you.
Our turn:
After that brief visit, we hit the road and drove back to Denver. We had a little time to kill before dinner, so we thought this would be a good time to address Scotty’s shoe problem. We went back across the street from our hotel to the Target. At first, it wasn’t looking good. The selection wasn’t very large, and the shoes they did have were in the $50 range. We found one pair of shoes in Scotty’s size on the clearance shelf, but he didn’t like them. Finally, we found a box in his size on a different shelf that had a clearance sticker on them. They were a brownish color, but I sold them as looking like good “hiking shoes”. That seemed to do the trick. $14.95 later, we solved the shoe problem.
Thankfully, our dinner spot was not downtown. But unfortunately, we would still need to drive north on I-25. We had to go 5 miles, so we gave ourselves a half hour to get there. It took 22 minutes.
Our destination was
Beaujo’s Colorado Style Pizza.
This was another spot we’d seen on TV somewhere—maybe the Travel Channel, on Food Paradise? Their specialty is—get this—pizza. Beaujo’s is known for their unique crust—it’s thick and hand-rolled into a twisty shape, designed to hold in the mountainous toppings. After you eat the pizza, you’re supposed to take the crust and drizzle honey on it as an after-dinner treat.
As an added bonus, we were meeting a DIS friend here! Jill (
@jedijill ), our aforementioned Denver-area resident and travel guide, was actually willing to be seen in public with us. So we had that going for us, which was nice.
At least, it seemed like she was willing to meet with us. We arrived at the restaurant only to get a message from her that she was running late.
So we needed to occupy ourselves. Thankfully, Baby Drew found this bike rack outside. He walked through the “tunnel” about 20 or 30 or 80 times.
Just a little while later, we were seated and Jill arrived. We were having such a good time talking that I think the server got tired of waiting around for us to put in our order, but eventually we did. Supposedly their “5-pounder” would be enough to serve 5-6 people, so we ordered one of those.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I think we all could have eaten more. I was expecting a Chicago-style pie, big and thick and overflowing with ingredients, but instead it was more like a normal pizza inside the rolled crust. It was good pizza. We just should have ordered a little more.
We also drizzled honey on the dough just like they told us to. And...it was ok. Not the greatest food ever, but certainly not a bad way to eat pizza crust. My kids would have just left it on the plate by itself.
Thankfully, Jill came through for us and ordered a plate of six giant choclate-chip cookies covered in ice cream. That hit the spot. Our family had no pretenses of decorum and basically devoured the cookies in about 30 seconds flat.
We had a great time that evening with Jill. It was great to see a friendly face! Thanks for dinner!
EDIT: I forgot to tell the story of the end of our evening. We had successfully climbed a 14,000-ft. mountain and lived to tell the tale. We'd successfully replaced Scotty's shoes. And we'd had a nice meal with Jill and were content to head back to the hotel.
We did not successfully fight off altitude sickness. Most everyone was fine, but on the way back, Scotty started complaining that he was tired and didn't feel good. We tried to give him some water and get him back to the room to go to sleep, hoping that would help him recover by morning. But unfortunately, not more than 5 minutes after being put down to bed, he was up again, and in the bathroom, hunched over the sink.
I'm pretty sure all that pizza tasted better on the way down. Poor Julie spent the evening cleaning up the mess. Poor Scotty...and poor Julie.
They got better.
Coming Up Next: We venture into the Frozen Tundra…along with Batman.