February 1-2, 2003: A Weekend in San Antonio
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In January, I had my first Data Junction trip of the year to a company in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Of course, I took a flight from DFW to the new outlying in airport north of I-70 in northeast Denver.

Knowing that I was coming to the Denver area, I called up my friend, Ed Shuping, who was currently living in Fort Collins, about fifty miles north of Denver. Since I was going to be working fifty miles south of Denver, trying to get up to see him any evening after work would mean getting there well after dark, so we thought the best thing would be for me to fly to Denver early in the day, and go up to see him first. So that's what I did, arriving in Denver about lunchtime and then getting my rental car and driving north to Fort Collins.

I followed Ed's directions and met him at the real estate office where he was working as a kind of apprentice to a local ReMax Realtor. We had a nice visit in his office, and I got a good picture of Ed at the ReMax office.

Ed lived in an apartment in downtown Fort Collins, so we drove down there and parked and then walked around the picturesque, trendy downtown area for a while, eventually stopping to have dinner. After a nice visit, I dropped Ed at his apartment and headed down to Colorado Springs.

In Colorado Springs, I was working on the south side of the city.

On this trip, I stayed at a La Quinta quite close to the office complex housing NeoCore, Inc., the company I was here to do training for. NeoCore (since absorbed by a larger tech firm) specializes in XML Databases and various consulting and training services for its own software. You can see from the aerial view that NeoCore was located just on the other side of the Interstate from the area where the LaQuinta was.

Other places of note around where I was working were the restaurant where I ate one of the nights I was here (the others being a Mexican restaurant on the north side of town and a restaurant in Fort Collins) and a pond just north of the La Quinta that hosted quite a few ducks.

I had not been to Colorado Springs to work before, so there were a couple of Baskin-Robbins stores for me to add to my list. One of them was over on the east side of the city, right around Circle Drive, and from that side of town I had a nice view looking west towards the Rockies.

On the last day of the class, we finished up a bit early, and so I had plenty of time before my evening flight back to Dallas. I headed up the Interstate to US 24, which heads west up into the Rockies. I wanted to see if I could drive to the top of Pikes Peak before heading home. As I drove up Highway 24, I could see Pikes Peak ahead of me. I could see there was snow on the top (this being January), so I resigned myself to the idea that trying to drive up the highway to the top wouldn't be a good idea in a typical rental car.

But I continued on towards towards the town of Cascade, Colorado, where I turned off on some local streets that led to the highway to the top of Pikes Peak. When I got to the Pikes Peak Toll Road entrance station, I also discovered that the entrance fee was $20. Since there was little likelihood that I would get very far along the highway this afternoon, I decided to save the drive to the top for another trip to Colorado- preferably one in the summer. Fred and I get out that way frequently, so that was certainly a possibility.

I returned to the Interstate and headed north to Denver and the airport for my flight home.

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	February 1-2, 2003: A Weekend in San Antonio
	Return to Index for 2003