Roxborough State Park

     Before we travelled to Colorado this past summer, I asked one of my co-workers, who happens to be a native, to recommend some of his favorite places to visit. Consulting with our hosts, the Sherpa Girls, we opted for Roxborough State Park just south of Denver, and it was a good choice. The park is sort of indicative of the state as a whole, in that it is a mix of prairie and mountains. You enter Roxborough through the prairie, and as dramatic as mountains are, I also appreciate these wide exposed places, with their broad skies and bending grasses.

     With the prairie at your back, you enter the rest of the park through a cleft in the rock.

     Once inside, ancient red rocks reveal themselves. These are part of the same formation that form Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, and Red Rocks Park just west of Denver, only Roxborough lacks the crowds of these better known places.

    The rains had been more generous than normal, benefitting the grasses and wildflowers, including a few non-native interlopers.

          I think I could live here, even for just one summer afternoon.

Milepost 500

     I started blogging back in 2008, and I am finding it hard to believe that I have somehow managed to produce 500 posts. I know I have not produced 500 quality posts, but in this age of infographics, click-throughs, contact lists, tweets, virtual friends and short attention spans, 500 is not so bad. Lately I have been having trouble finding the time to be a good blogger. I know I have not posted as frequently as I once did, and I have, regretfully, not been able to keep up with what other bloggers have been doing as well. I am not normally one to make excuses, but I will anyway. I can equally blame lack of time, Facebook, at-home competition for the computer, and better things to do. So if you haven't seen me lurking around your blog recently, please don't feel slighted -
it's not you, it's me.

     Ironically, I have much blogging material to work with at the moment, including one more Colorado post from this summer, and I just got back from a photo-rich trip to south Florida. However, before I get to any of these posts, I did not want 500 to pass by unnoticed, even though that number is only significant because we make it so. I guess if our species had a different number of fingers on each hand, different anniversaries would be celebrated. And speaking of celebrating, just how does one mark 500 posts? How about with something completely random? We drove home from Florida yesterday, and as in any long road trip, random things are seen, random stops are made. In Lumberton, North Carolina we stopped to fill up our tank with the gasoline that would get us home. Someone at the station had been quite creative with the landscaping, especially with containers. Since sharing is the very essence of blogging, let me do so.

     The southern magnolia planters were the most interesting. The trees are actually planted in the ground, but the trunks are wrapped in black drainage pipe. There were a matching pair flanking the entrance to the service station.

    Whether this is your first visit,  your 500th, or more plausibly, something in between, I thank you for stopping by.