My Awesome Trip To Colorado (Day Four/Part Two): The Manitou Cliff Dwellings & Goodbye to Colorado 11-07-2021

The Manitou Cliff Dwellings in Manitou Springs, Colorado.

Well folks, now comes the final post about my amazing trip to Colorado and the final place I visited: the famous Manitou Cliff Dwellings on U.S. Highway 24 in Manitou Springs.

The Manitou Cliff Dwellings are a privately-owned tourist attraction consisting of reconstruction of ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings. The Ancestral Puebloans lived and traveled the Four Corners area of the Southwestern United States from 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1300. Some of the building materials were taken from a collapsed Ancestral Puebloan site near Cortez in southwest Colorado, shipped by railroad to Manitou Springs, and reconstructed in 1904 into their present form as Ancestral Puebloan-style buildings. The park was opened to the public in 1907.

Despite the fact these particular cliff dwelling structures are not actual ruins, the care done to make them look historically accurate is pretty amazing. Me and Alex had a blast the hour-and-a-half we visited the site following our visit to the Garden of the Gods park.

The Manitou Cliff Dwellings park also includes a wonderful museum and gift shop with many outstanding exhibits.

The following are the photos I took of my visit to the site with my youngest brother, Alex.

The Manitou Cliff Dwellings Museum & Gift Shop.

The Manitou Cliff Dwellings Gift Shop had loads of wonderful
souvenirs.

Yours truly standing in the parking lot with the mountains in the

background. The last photo of the last full day of my Colorado
trip. Photo taken by my brother, Alex.

And with that my friends, the last full day of my awesome trip to Colorado came to an end.

I spent the remainder of that Sunday evening hanging out with my brothers and their family, mostly playing card games and enjoying the remainder of my time with them.

My only regret on the trip was not being able to take the hike up Pike's Peak this time around, although I hope to eventually do so on a future trip -- God willing.

So the next day, Monday November 8th, after saying goodbye to everyone, my sister-in-law, Shanna, drove me the two hours to Denver International Airport where I once again braved air travel (again my thanks to the professionals at Frontier Airlines!) and a three hour time jump back to Charlotte. I left Denver about 3:00 PM and returned to Charlotte at a little after 8:00 PM, losing an extra couple of hours.

Perhaps the thing that tripped me out the most about my return wasn't just the fact that I regained the three hours between time zones from Mountain to Eastern, but the fact that the weekend I was there Daylight Saving Time ended and there went another hour of sunlight.

Also having spent four full days at a higher altitude than the place I'd grown up and lived my whole life, I spent most of the evening and some of the next morning readjusting to "normal" air pressure. Needless to say my ears popped and squeaked more than a couple times. Ouch!

And that folks concludes my series about my awesome trip to Colorado and the sites that I saw while I was there. Between those and the time I spent with my birthday boy brother, Roy, and younger brother, Alex, and the family out there, I have no regrets and lots of good memories -- which I was more than happy to share with y'all here.

Please let me know what you think of my trip in the comments section below, and I hope y'all enjoyed taking this trip with me. Have a wonderful Holiday Season and Merry Christmas to y'all!