Olympic Training Center and Ghost Town Museum — Colorado Springs

I have been super busy since we returned from our trip, but I’m going to wrap up our trip in the next post or two.  Hubby’s sister and family lives in Colorado Springs and we spent about a week with them.  We had a lot of fun visiting some of the sites in that area.

Olympic Training Center: One afternoon we visited the Olympic Training Center and took the tour of the facilities.

Before the tour began the kids tried out some of the equipment — the barbells, rowing machine, bikes, etc.

There was also a display area with photos, etc. We adults spent a lot of time reading through things while the kids tried their best to do the long jump (the record — more than 8 meters or over 29 feet, which was marked out on the floor).

The tour let us take a look at some of facilities — such as the men’s gymnastics training area (part of it, at least) and the weight-training area. Since athletes have to be at least 16 to train at the Olympic Training Center, most female gymnastics (who typically are younger than the male gymnasts when they compete at the Olympics) train elsewhere.  Male gymnasts are typically older 20-25, so many of them train in Colorado.

Ghost Town Museum: This is an indoor museum, so it was perfect on one of the rainy afternoons.  There are store-front replicas of an old gold mining town.  There are lots of hands-on things for the kids to do.

They had an amazing collection of old artifacts from the late 1800s. Each room had different tools, books, clothes, furniture and so forth.

I spent a lot of time looking at the old-time dentist drill. It’s in the picture below on the right. Could you imagine your dentist using a foot pedal to drill your teeth? Ugh!!

At the end, you could pan for gold. All the kids found little flakes of gold to take home: