Red Hot and Blue in Colorado Springs
No, No, I didn’t take any photos of my shopping trip yesterday; we don’t have a Macy’s in Pensacola, so I spent some time having fun in one of my favorite stores. It was a great day. I also found Ruth’s Stitchery and spent a lot of time looking at new quilting fabrics and patterns. The problem with Ruth’s is that they also have fabulous cross-stitching materials and patterns, and I am SO tempted to buy them, even though I don’t really cross stitch any more; unless you have really really good light, stitching on linen, which is what I like to do, is a lot more difficult than it used to be.
I picked up AdventureMan and as a special treat to me he took me to Red Hot and Blue, my favorite restaurant in Colorado Springs. He said ‘have you noticed how many of your reviews are BBQ restaurants?” LLOOOLLL! Yes! It’s true! We love BBQ. We do go to other restaurants, but most of the Pensacola restaurants we hang out in I have already reviewed at least once! Out of town, we often explore new BBQ. 🙂
We started with hushpuppies, and these were small, but good:
We tested all the sauces – the hot ones were really HOT!
We couldn’t possibly eat all this food, but we tried it all, and enjoyed it so much there was no room left for dessert:
Red Hot and Blue Chili
Their tangy cole slaw
My pulled chicken and potato salad
AdventureMan’s pulled pork and beans
Eid Mubarak 2010
Happy Happy Eid to all my Moslem friends, may your fast be blessed and may you celebrate your Eid with great joy.
Wyoming to Colorado Springs
We are eager to get going, but oh, we are shivering, and happy we brought a little fleece with us:
It is a glorious morning, bright sunshine, clear air, a day when we are glad to be alive and on the road.
Across South Dakota and Montana, we saw the huge round rolls of hay that we saw in France and Germany, but across Wyoming, most of the bales are the old fashioned square ones. We are thinking square is easier to store, but there must be some advantage, also, to the round ones, as they seem to be the latest invention. Anyone know why?
We find a rest stop so we can change drivers, and there is a set of sculptures there called The Greeting and the Gift, just as you are exiting Wyoming and entering Colorado:
I love this one. It looks noble. The First Nation (Native American) is offering a pipe of water. When I was a kid, I would have thought it was a peace pipe, but the explanation says otherwise. The Greeting statue I don’t like as much for two reasons – his hands seem out-of-scale large to me, and the hair does not look like a mountain man or explorer (to me) but looks sort of Hellenic. What do you think?
At the end of a very short drive is a city I love, Colorado Springs. I love it because (most of the time) the air seems clear and clean to me. I love it in the winter, when it is cold, and in the summer, when it is hot, it is dry heat, like Kuwait, but not so hot, so it doesn’t bother me. There are a million quilt shops here, all of which I intend to hit today while AdventureMan does some consulting and I drive the gypsy-mobile. There are also Macy’s department stores, which Pensacola doesn’t have, and Sephora, which Pensacola may be getting soon but did not have when I left.
We went to see George Clooney’s new film, The American, which gave us hours of conversation, and on our way to our Marriott home picked up a feast from Whole Foods – all vegetable! Balsamic grilled brussel sprouts, marinated grilled beets, a vegetarian meatloaf that really tasted like meat (!), guacomole, a pico de gallo with some bite, pita bread, sauteed garlic spinach, and some wonderfully tasty olives. AdventureMan picked up a really good bottle of Colorado merlot (yes, it exists, and is called Two Rivers: Chateau Deux Fleuves Vineyards.
Crowning our day was a sunset over Pike’s Peak. I don’t like a lot of drama in my life, but I love a lot of drama in a sunset. I loved this one so much that I am going to show you three different shots, because I can’t choose the one I like the best.
Cockroaches VS Drug-Resistant Bacteria
You have to know, I truly hate cockroaches. They give me the creeps. When I see one – and cockroaches are a part of life in Florida, even with a pest service – my knees feel weak, and I feel shaky, but I have to force myself to stomp on them and flush them away. Now, AOL News tells us cockroaches can help us fight serious infections, including the one I hate the most, MRSA. You can read the entire article by clicking on the blue type above.
(Sept. 7) — Cockroaches, the creepy critters reviled for invading kitchens the country over, might be modern medicine’s best option for fending off dangerous, drug-resistant bacterial infections.
British researchers at the University of Nottingham’s School of Veterinary Medicine and Science are behind the discovery, which entails harnessing molecules from the tissues of cockroaches and locusts to combat bacteria like E. coli and MRSA (drug-resistant staph infections).
Chemicals found in the brain and central nervous tissues of cockroaches are able to kill 90 percent of dangerous bacteria in lab-based tests.
The potent chemicals, found in the brain and central nervous tissues of the critters, are able to kill 90 percent of E. coli and MRSA in lab-based tests.
“Superbugs … have shown the ability to cause untreatable infections and have become a major threat in our fight against bacterial diseases,” Dr. Naveed Khan, who supervised the work of lead researcher Simon Lee, said in a press release. “Thus, there is a continuous need to find additional sources of novel anti-microbials to confront this menace.”
In a twist that’s an ironic upside to our own revulsion for roaches, it’s their “unsanitary and unhygienic environments,” Lee speculated, that spurred the critters to develop toxins against the bacteria.
You can read the rest of the original news article by clicking here.
The Bad and the Good in Rawlins, Wyoming
“Reservations?” the desk clerk snapped at us as we walked in, and almost speechless, we said ‘no’ and he machine gunned “the-rooms-are-one-twenty-nine-a-night-plus-tax.”
No smile. No welcome.
We mentioned we are seniors, military, AAA and lots of other things and he sighed and said the lowest rate was $125.
There isn’t a lot to choose from in Rawlins, Wyoming, and Laramie is another hour and a half down the road. We agree to take the room, but we are appalled at the clerk, and his idea of “Welcome” to the Hampton Inn, part of the Hilton Hotel Family. We are particularly astonished because we have had great experiences in other Hilton Hotels, and we have friends who swear by the Hampton Inn.
Our room is nice, but . . . somebody has smoked in this room. The pillows reek, the linens reek and the bathroom reeks, while the hotel appears brand new.
We had seen a sign for a barbecue restaurant, so we asked the clerk how to get there and he wrinkled his nose, waved his hands in front of him and frowned. He told us that many people had gone there and found it unclean, hairs in drinks, etc. He recommended the Aspen, and told us how to get there, but . . . it was closed.
Just down the street, however, in Rawlins, Wyoming, was Anong’s Thai Cuisine.
The food was wonderful. We had hot tea and salad rolls, which came with a thick, spicy peanut sauce. I had the tofu in spicy basil sauce, and AdventureMan had spicy vegetables and cashews, and both were excellent. The service was prompt, courteous and helpful. It was a total surprise to find such excellence. They were doing great business, too, and we know why! The food was delicious!
The great food cancelled out the shock of our disappointing welcome in the Hampton Inns.
Update: AdventureMan talked with the day manager this morning who laughed and said that ‘Nate’ had put in his 2 weeks notice the night before and was unusually surly, but that at his best, he was always shoddy and unprofessional. We believe it is a very good thing that he find work elsewhere, and not in the hospitality industry. So don’t hold our experience against the Hampton Inns – it was a disgruntled employee we were dealing with, with many, many complaints against him.
Sights Along the Road from Boise to Utah to Wyoming
We drive. We trade off driving. During these long days, we do see some dramatic scenery, but we are driving for hours, and the best part of our day tends to be finding our hotel and settling in. We were lucky to find another Marriott Residence Inn in Boise, with a wonderful pool, a warm welcome, popcorn in the room to be popped in the microwave in our little kitchen. After lunch at Mazatlan, even though it was very salad-y, we were really sort of restauranted out, so we popped by a grocery store, bought sandwiches and salads, and took them back to eat at our own breakfast bar. After having a swim, of course.
The beds at the Marriott Residence are SO good. We sleep hard, and get up ready to start another day, the hot breakfast even includes oatmeal. I choke it down, thinking of how my sister Sparkle calls it ‘spackle’. Can you believe there are people living on this earth who LIKE eating oatmeal??
By seven ten we are on the road, by seven twenty we are back at the hotel. I was going to take a photo of the sunrise and discovered I had forgotten my camera at the hotel. I am thinking (glass half full) how very lucky I was to find out right away, and we were back on the road by seven thirty.
Here are some of the sights we saw – and only in Oregon and Idaho have I seen so many dogs in the back of trucks:
And never have I seen so many trucks. I though trucks were a very Southern thing, but they are also a very Western thing. Here are some sights from our long day:
We saw so many wonderful crops growing in Southern Washington, cherries, peaches, apricots, apples, beans – and in Idaho, we saw a lot of cattle, and sheep, and . . . we think these are potatos:
This was an unspeakable toilet I encountered in Southern Idaho, exceptionally bad.
Traffic was light through Wyoming, but heavy coming in the other direction:
We had a good thing and a bad thing happen at the end of the day, but that’s the next blog entry. 🙂
Eastern Oregon, Boise, Utah to Wyoming
The best part of this two day slog was finding this restaurant, Mazatlan, in Pendleton, Oregon:
It was a great break on a very long day.
Edmonds Market Day
It’s all rush rush rush but we make time on Saturday morning to go to the Edmonds Market, my very favorite thing to do. First, I wanted to show you how my little home town decorates the street lights with hanging baskets:
Street pots:
And one of my favorite vendors, the Cedar Creek Soap lady. 🙂
(My favorite soaps are Clove, Cinnamon Orange and Safari)
Wooded Boise
I am driving and AdventureMan is reading from the AAA Tour book.
“Basque explorers and hunters found the area and it was full of green trees so they called it Boisee´” he said.
Boise´ would be bwa-say, but Americans call it Boy’-see, LLOOLLL, and actually, most call it Boy’zee.
We also went through Yakima (first a as in “Al” or “advice) Ya’-kih-mah, and Umatilla, and all kinds of places with great names . . . Cle Elem, Snoqualamie, etc. but we did not go through Walla Walla. All these wonderful, colorful names, many from First Nation peoples, some from the earliest explorers, some names of early settlers. We crossed the 45th latitude in Oregon, and traces of the Oregon Trail.
Edmonds, Washington Street Gardens
In a time where states and counties and cities and towns are cutting back, I am infinitely grateful to my little home town that they find the resources to maintain the street gardens. In the town, you find huge baskets of flowers hanging from poles along the main streets (one of which is called Main Street, in true small town fashion). These are from the street level gardens; they are so beautiful.
Nearby, two of our favorite stores are side by side:
Woo HOOO, Half Price Books is having their annual Labor Day Sale, 20% off everything in the store. Like we need more books. 😉
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