We are in Iowa near Des Moines today. Arrived here in two days from Colorado Springs. Tomorrow we will start a two day stay at the Winnebago factory in Forest City, Iowa where our motorhome was built. We will have some minor repairs made and also tour the plant.
We only had one day at Colorado Springs so decided to travel to the top of Pikes Peak. No, we didn't hike to the summit nor did we drive our underpowered car there. We boarded the cog train and rode it to the 14,110' summit. What a 9 mph blast! We may have made better time but the train had to slow for deer on the track and at another point for marmots on the track. This cog train has been in operation for more than 100 years. You'd figure that the deer and marmots would have figured this out by now.

Going up












At the summit. The train is powered by 4 400 hp Cummins diesel engines, two for going up and two for going down. Shucks, our motorhome has one of thoseCummins 400hp engines and so far we have travelled 7000 miles on this trip.









Yep. We made it to the summit too thanks in part to the oxygen boost canister in my pocket.












Above the tree line and approaching the summit. Notice the cog train track traversing the mountain.

The views and vistas from the train and the summit were awesome. This is one of them. You may notice the open pit mine in the upper left of center of the photo. This is an active gold mine and extracts $1,000,000 of gold daily. Do you think that there are open 365 days a year? Oh yea.