When Garden of the Gods Was Divine

I found this online via Google image search just now. I happen to own a specimen of this card in my collection. Almost all my postcards from long ago, however, are postmarked and have real messages, from one family member to another, nearly always in beautiful cursive hand. During my travels from 2004-2013, when I wandered the country in my Bimmer, I obsessively bought and sent postcards to people, especially to my nieces, but also to old high school and college friends. I refused for several years to join Facebook, and told people that sending postcards was my version of Facebook. Finally I caved and joined Facebook and it was an absolutely disaster, as I've mentioned. I called myself "The Last Postcard Writer". I felt great connection to the unknown people, now long dead, who wrote and received the postcards in my collection. I stopped sending postcards because I became convinced people didn't care anymore, or thought it was weird, especially the frequency at which I sent them.  I know my sister saved the many dozens of cards I sent during the height of my postcard sending mania, from 2008-2011. I love my old collection, although I don't collect anymore cards from estate sales, etc.  But I am super appreciative of those who conserve this parts of our past. One day, perhaps in a future generation, young people will wander through them, marveling at the treasures of "real artifacts" from the past. It's a scene almost straight out of The Hunger Games first movie, when Katniss is walking through the flea market.  I hope all the postcards currently in existence surive until then, although I know that is not possible. The weirdest thing is knowing that in the future, they will see how the frequency of cards being sent dropped of a cliff at the Millennium and never came back, and that a nontrivial portion of the ones written and sent in the current epoch will have been sent by yours truly. If that is the only contribution I make to humanity, a postcard writer named "Uncle Matt" whose identity is mostly unknown, then I think I will be happy over it. In fact, I am beginning to think it's not a bad thing after all. 

 Last weekend we flew up to Colorado Springs to spend three nights in Colorado. The trip was copletely arranged by Jessica. Thanks to her, I mostly went along for the ride. It was a very nice weekend, although it difficult for me to let go of the stress of job. 

Colorado Springs has a nice accessible airport. The rental car desk was painfully slow, but finding the car was easy once we had our eyes. The drive from the airport into downtown reveals what a "small town" the city is, which is a definite plus.

We stayed the night in a hotel that was created recently by renovating a century old mining exchange building. At checkin, they gave us a a free dinner in the hotel restaurant for no reason whatsoever.  The next morning we walked through downtown to have breakfast at place that had homemade biscuits.

Then we drove up to Garden of the Gods, which Jessica had never seen. It was pleasant to drive through. I warned her that it might not be as overwhelming as one would think. It was a tourist attraction that had its peak in the middle Twentieth Century. I used to collect historic postcards from estate sales when I was kid (I still have collection), and there is no shortage of postcards of the Garden of the Gods. It was rather iconic. But it has long since been eclipsed by destinations deeper in the mountains. This is due to the improvement and expansion of highways, and by air travel, which let people access mountain destinations immediately. In the old days, Colorado Springs was a destination unto itself.  This made a relatively easy destination for Midwesterners in the days when Americans took their children on road trip vacations. 

Afterwards we drove through downtown Manitou Springs, which similarly had a heyday as a family tourist destination that began declining in the 1960s as people sought more authentic experiences in the high country. Now it has a distinctive nostalgia appeal because of the quaint buildings that survive, which delight young children to see. 

Not surpisingly, because everyplace has been "rediscovered" and will never be "undiscovered" again, the real estate prices in Manitou Springs are no doubt very high. People seek out anything remotely unique in order to harvest its uniqueness, either to sell as a commodity by developing property there, or by living there in order to associate with other folks who are seeking such unique communities. Of course they inevitable change what they come to find.

I don't know the situation in Manitou Springs, but judging by the smattering of rainbow flags being displayed along the main route through town, it would seem this process is well underway. All this is a metro area that is supposedly "conservative." In some ways, it is the same thing that has happened across the entire state of Colorado. 

Seeing the remnants of the mid 20th century family roadtrip era made me happy. It reminded me of good times with my grandparents long ago, and the kind of society they built and lived in. It is all going away. Mostly it is gone already. Never again will American highways be teaming with the family road trippers. Almost every aspect of that culture has already been dismantled to the point where only superficial representations of it still exist. I can't say I much like it.