Tour to the south of Denver for 8-10 hours

     You will need to have your ID to get into the Air Force Academy.

We'll use I-25 to go south and our first stop will be at the Air Force Academy which is a huge complex built after the second world war. We'll stop at the visitor center and see a movie about the daily life of the cadets. If the architecturally stunning chapel is open, we'll go inside. Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Buddist churches are located in one building. More than one million tourists visit the Air Force Academy annually.

Our next stop will be at the Garden of the Gods , a beautiful park with huge, stunning red rock formations. Then we'll go through the old part of Colorado Springs to the nearby Manitou Springs, which was a famous resort with a mineral water bath house and mineral water drinking fountains. People from as far as London used to come here . You still can try the mineral water from ten different water fountains located all over the town. Many people come here to attempt to hike the Manitou Incline - only a mile long but consisting of 2744 rail tie steps at a very steep angle leading to the top of a mountain from which you can see a gorgeous view of Colorado Springs. Manitouu Springs is located at the foot of the fourteener Pikes Peak, which is one of the 54 mountains in Colorado with a height over 14000 feet. In the past people used to use donkeys to climb to the top of this mountain. When Katherine Lee Bates was at the summit, she was so impressed with the view that later on she wrote a poem that became the song America the Beautiful. You don't need to use a donkey any more, you can just get to the top of the mountain by car. In fact, the same road is used for the annual Pike's Peak auto road race. We'll also stop at the Broadmoor Hotel, one of the best in the United States. The hotel is next to the Seven Falls nature area and the Colorado Springs Zoo, a quite unusual zoo built in several levels onto the side of a mountain. You can actually hand feed the giraffes there from an elevated platform, which is a lot of fun. If time permits, we can pass next to Helen's Falls and look at Colorado Springs from the top of that mountain.