August 30 [Garden of the Gods]
August 30
I kinda felt bad waking Peggy up, but I thought that we ought to enjoy the whole day together, since it was gonna be our last before school started again. And she was a little bit grumpy about being woken up before the sun rose, until I persuaded her to go out to the pasture and watch the sun rise with me.
So she put on her shoes and a sweatshirt 'cause it was a little chilly for her, and we went through the backyard to the fence, 'cause she said that she could jump over it.
It wasn't exactly a jump—she got ahold of the top and then swung her leg up and over, then dropped down on the other side and said it reminded her of being in high school and sneaking out of the house to parties.
We had to wait a little bit for a break in traffic, 'cause the road behind her house was kinda busy, and then we ran across and out into the empty pasture.
You could see all the airport spread out in front of us and that was really pretty with all the different colored lights along the runways and taxiways so that the airplanes would know where to go. And we sat down on the grass, leaning into each other, and watched as the sun came up over the horizon.
We sat there for a little bit, until the sun had climbed a little ways into the sky, and then she hugged me and said that we ought to get some coffee and I thought that was a good idea.
I helped push her back up over the wall and then I flew over myself and we went back inside and she started a pot of coffee than went upstairs to take a shower and I started making pancakes for everyone.
Me and Peggy had to wait a little bit for her parents to get up, 'cause they liked sleeping in when they didn't have to work. She said that her dad could work whenever he wanted to mostly, but she said sometimes when he was working on a big project he'd be up all night, especially because he had clients all over the world.
So we talked about the school year which would be starting soon. Peggy was going to be a senior, which meant that she'd get to graduate next year and she said that meant she'd have to figure out what she was going to do with her life after she graduated and that was a depressingly adult thing to have to figure out.
Next year was also my last, but I already knew that I'd be leading a weather team, I just didn't know where. I liked being on the coast and working with feral weather, so I would probably do that, but at the same time there was a lot of Equestria and maybe I would also like being somewhere else.
She said that we both would just have to play it by ear, and flicked my ear and I bumped my nose into her thigh and we were both still laughing when her parents came down.
After they ate breakfast they asked if there was anything in particular I wanted to do while I was still in Colorado and I said that I was open to anything that they thought would be interesting. So Chrissie packed us a lunch and said that we'd go to the Garden of the Gods first, which sounded like a really interesting place to visit. The Bible had said lots of things about other gods but not much about their gardens.
I hadn't known but we'd gone by it on our way to the cog railroad which took us up to Pikes Peak, and I thought that we were going further in the mountains, but then he turned down a road and pretty soon we got to a parking lot and all got out of the car.
The park was amazing! There were big rocks that jutted up and out of the landscape and the most interesting thing about them was that they had all gotten the way they were naturally. Nobody had balanced them on top of each other like I had on the top of Cameron Cone; they'd just gotten that way by centuries upon centuries of slow erosion by the wind and rain and by freezing and thawing. They were a beautiful red-orange color, and all around the trails in the park there were little signs that said what they were called, like the Kissing Camels or the Tower of Babel or even the White Rock.
People were allowed to climb some of the rocks, and we saw a couple of them working their way up one, which was really slow going for them. They had harnesses around them that were attached to ropes so that if they fell they wouldn't get hurt, and I asked Peggy if she'd ever done that. She said that she had a couple of times but it wasn't really her thing; she liked going fast, not slowly working her way up a rock face.
And all the rocks made a really good course for me when I flew, and I zoomed around the park for a little bit, being careful not to get too close to the climbers because I didn't want to make them nervous. I did think about landing on top of their rock but I don't think they would have liked it if I had.
We went to Red Rock Canyon next, and we ate our lunch in Highlander because there was a thunderstorm and even though it wound up not raining at all, there was a lot of lightning.
Once the storm had stopped, we got out of the car and walked around the paths that wound by big rock walls, and there was even one that was stepped and it looked kind of unnatural but I wasn't sure because the piled rocks in the Garden of the Gods had too. John told me that it had once been a quarry, and that's why the rocks were stepped like that, because people had cut them out. And I flew around it and there were odd little half-circles that ran down the edges of the rocks, and when I asked him about it he said that was where they'd drilled to put blasting powder in to explode the rocks loose. And he said that before people had explosives they would also drill boreholes and freeze the rocks off by putting water in them and then letting it freeze and expand to break loose the rocks, which was really clever.
After we'd gone around one of the trails and I'd flown though the gap in the ridge, we went back to Highlander and went on to the Cave of the Wind because John thought that I might enjoy that too and it wasn't too far away. And he said that they had a tour and I don't know what I was expecting but it went inside a big cave and that was really scary and I didn't like being in there much at all. At first it wasn't so bad but then we got further and further in and I started to think about all the rocks that were pushing down on top of us and I was getting more and more nervous and then they turned off all the lights and the tour guide said that this was what pitch black was like.
If I hadn't been right next to Peggy I would have galloped or flown off in terror and probably smashed into one of the walls or the stone icicles which stuck out of the ceiling and floor. This was not the place for me any more than an earth pony belonged on a cloud. I closed my eyes and at least then I could pretend that was why I didn't see anything but the air was wrong and the sounds were all wrong and when the lights finally came back on after an eternity of darkness I had to leave.
Peggy came with me and she said she was sorry, she should have thought about how I'd feel underground and I said I didn't have anypony to blame but myself because I knew what caves were but it hadn't seemed scary at first until we got a little ways in and I started to think about how we might get lost or the rocks might fall down on us or there could even be a monster lurking in the depths of the cave and we'd never know until it was too late.
When we finally got to the entrance I was so happy to be outside again that I took off and did a loop in the sky and it was so good to feel proper air under my wings again. And then I felt bad for leaving Peggy behind on the ground and because she'd followed me out of the cave instead of finishing the tour but when I landed she hugged me and said that it was okay and that she didn't mind at all and I could have told her sooner that I was uncomfortable and we would have left.
Then John and Chrissie came back out, too, and they said that they were sorry too and that they should have thought about how I might feel in a cave. But I didn't blame them; they couldn't have known.
And we did have other fun while we were there. They had a zipline that they called the Batapult, and there was a chair that you rode down in and then it pushed you back up. And I had to get special permission to ride it because the park ranger didn't think that the seat belt would hold me in the right way and I might fall off but they eventually decided that since I could fly and knew not to run into the wires that held it up, it was okay. It was almost like I was flying with Peggy.
They also had an obstacle course that was called the Wind Walker and our tickets that we'd bought for the Batapult were supposed to let us do that, too, but they wouldn't let me because they said I would be too dangerous for the other climbers if I was flying around. Which I guess was fair but I would have liked to try it anyway. I bet if Mister Salvatore had been there he could have made them let me.
Everyone else got to try it, though. I could see that Peggy wanted to, and I didn't want to hold her back especially after she'd been so nice to come out of the cave with me, so I said that I'd be happy to just sit on the ground and watch her do it. And we both persuaded John and Chrissie to try it, too.
It was actually more fun that I'd thought watching them climb. And there was a part of it that went over the edge of a canyon and when Peggy got close I went over the fence and flew around under her.
When she got back off the course she said that it had been very strange to look down at me and she said that she had taken a picture of me and showed me on her portable telephone. It was very strange to see because I had never seen a picture of me from above when I was flying.
We ended our trip there by panning for gold. They had a sluiceway and you'd pick up some soil in your pan and slosh it around with some water from there and then since the gold was so heavy it sank to the bottom and if you were really careful you'd get out all the other soil and only have gold left. We all had some gold flakes in our dirt but they were tiny, no bigger than a grain of sand.
Then John said that he'd found a gold nugget and held up a shiny rock and we were all really amazed until Chrissie said that the edges were too flat to actually be gold and she asked him if he'd bought some Iron Pyrite at the gift shop when he'd said that he was going to the bathroom.
And so after he'd been caught cheating he was more careful and it turned out that he was the only one who was any good at panning for gold because he actually got a couple of small flakes and he said that he was going to keep them so he had Chrissie pour out a water bottle into the sluiceway and he dumped his gold and some sand into the bottle, and he said that he'd sort it out the rest of the way when he got home.
Nobody felt like cooking but we didn't want to go to a restaurant either so John ordered pizzas for us and we ate pizza. Then Chrissie said that since we'd exercised our muscles all day it was time to exercise our minds and we played a game called Scrabble which is where you make words on squares and Chrissie won and I said she was cheating because she knew more English words than I did. So they asked me if I could make an Equestrian word and I said that the alphabets weren't the same but I could come close and I picked up some of the letter-squares and made a word that was worth a hundred points 'cause it had all the valuable letters in it. I told them that that was the word for a lumpy shade cloud and I would have made the word for a big thundercloud but they didn't have enough Qs. And then John asked me if that was actually a real word and I said that it ought to be.
We had root-beer floats for dessert, which were really good although the root beer made my nose tickly. And then we talked for a little bit longer until Chrissie had to go to bed so that she could get up for work in the morning, and before she did she hugged me and said how nice it had been to spend time with me.
John promised that he'd say his goodbyes in the morning, and that he'd like to stay up a little bit longer and chat but he probably had about a thousand computer letters that he had to answer and he was too old to stay up all night anymore.
So Peggy and I got a couple of beers out of the electric icebox and drank them at the kitchen table and they were kind of watery but she said that Coors was a Colorado tradition, even if it was bad. And she said that when her dad was in college, they weren't sold much east of the Rockies, and so whenever he went and visited his friend in Chicago, he'd take a couple of cases of beer for him.
After we'd finished them, we went up to her room and snuggled up in bed together.
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Ah, Scrabble.
Two interesting bits about the challenge rules that a lot of people don't realize. A "word," only doesn't count if its challenged and not found in the dictionary and you can only challenge it on the turns its played. So you can totally bluff in scrabble. Second is you use one and only one dictionary that the group agrees on before play starts to arbitrate challenges, and a challenge still works if the word isn't in that particular dictionary even if its otherwise a real word. So if you can manage to get a small layman's dictionary to be used you can trip up people who like to use obscure words.
Nuances you can use to drive your resident Twilight Sparkle nuts if you play them.
*Happy memories of using obscure original RPG monsters and managing to convince people that they had a real mythological basis and would totally be in the dictionary if they challenged me.*
7689383
trust me as I defiantly know about flares and the use of them.
all I am allowed to say is I have family that has served in the military.
and I may have or may not have served.
Silver Glow is attempting to acquire some new emergency pillows for when her regular pillows are unavailable.
You might be able to get Coors everywhere, but you can still only get Yuengling in certain eastern states.
Scrabble is all about the two letter words. ZA, QI, XI, XU, KA, JO.
7689484
The crappy thing about playing online is sometimes the game won't let you make a word even if both players agree it is a word. Case in point: I was playing against a fellow Magic player, and made jitte across a triple-word and double-letter square, and the game wouldn't allow it. Said it wasn't a word. Even though it totally is, and we both knew it.
7689498 Unfortunately, that's in accordance with the rules. Foreign words aren't allowed, unless they've made their way into the English dictionary.
Heh. I bet she'd laugh herself silly if someone showed her the "Smokey and the Bandit" movie where they're smuggling Coors beer to the east...
I haven't really been paying attention to the dates on these journals
August 30th? I started school on around the 22nd or so, haha.
I guess Silver won't be wanting to visit any mines. It's true there's nothing more pitch black then being hundreds of meters under the ground.
Which is a very real possibility where she comes from. I guess that thought takes some serious getting used to when you've never been to Equestria.
Now I wonder what a batpony would have thought about the experience. Just found a stalactite to hang down from when the lights went out?
Ah, caves. I think I might be allowed back after all this time as one armed jack was old enough that sadly he wont be with us anymore.
I got a bit like Silver, the waiting and the waiting and the waiting in the dark with loss of sense of time and wasnt it time to be heading home in order to make it out o the area while we had daylight.
So I fired up the flash light.
I've been to Garden of the Gods. I can agree that it's pretty neat. Had an interesting thing happen the one time I went, though. Someone was apparently climbing where they weren't supposed to, because at one point we heard a park ranger saying the following into a bullhorn:
YOU ARE VERY ILLEGAL.
ICR the game but there used to be a game where you were given obscure words (like sesquipedalian) and had to give a definition. The other players had to decide if you were bluffing or not.
Yeah, I can get that. I'm in my senior year as well, although I'm not graduating in the spring.
And caves are awesome, although it makes sense that pegasi wouldn't like them.
7690282
It's called "balderdash".
Humanity: If we can't do it, we'll make a tool to do it for us. If we can do it, we'll make a tool to do it better.
Ponies: Evolutionarily designed for snuggles.
7689511 Even for things that there is no English word for? That sucks.
7689453
Ah... nearly happy memories of playing 9-letter Scrabble and almost scoring 130+ points on a 2x triple-word. (Got blocked, of course, and by someone using a blank.)
I read "pants", which somehow changed the meaning of the whole paragraph.
But seriously, Silver has been getting pretty cuddly with Peggy lately. Is there still hope for the elusive USS Pegharilver?
I may have to visit some of those places.
7689453
Which I do sometimes. Also my mom gets mad when I play a legitimate word but don't know the definition of it.
We totally don't use that rule. Last time the family played, we used three different dictionaries, including a French dictionary.
That's the one shitty thing about playing online, because words with friends automatically doesn't let you play anything that's not in its dictonary. When i tried to play jitte, my friend, who also played Magic: The Gathering, said it was a legit words, but Words with Friends didn't think so.
7689466
A prudent pegasus always has emergency pillows available
7689475
That's true. I think mostly just PA, right? That's the only place I've ever had it, anyway.
7689601
You know, I forgot that was the plot of the movie. Man, kids these days would never even understand why you'd smuggle beer.
7735726 "That's true. I think mostly just PA, right? That's the only place I've ever had it, anyway."
It's a PA brewery, but it's sold elsewhere. I've bought a case in Ohio and had it on tap in Florida.
7689670
K starts late, which was nice, but it also gets out late, which wasn't so nice. Getting a sublease for the summer from anyone other than a K-college student was a problem. My brother stayed with me over one summer when he was at U of M, and he had to sleep on the porch because the room he was gonna get was still in use for almost a month.
7689895
Nope, no chance. Being underground is not a place for pegasi.
7689913
All we've got to worry about (and not all that many places, really) is that there might be a bear in there, or maybe a great cat. In Equestria, there could be a dragon or an Ursa or any number of other horrible monsters. Ponies who want to visit Earth have to be warned about dangers like cars and electricity; humans in Equestria have to take courses on monster avoidance.
Probably. And if you left them off for a while, you might hear occasional high-pitched squeaks and clicks as she echolocates things around the cave.
7690006
I've been through a few here in the US, mostly the caves that are open to the public that have lights and tour guides and so on. Also a former gypsum mine once. I've never been overly enthusiastic about going in them, to be honest. But I could definitely last a tour inside.
7690130
From what I read on the site, you could climb if you got a permit first. There might have been other requirements that went with the permit (safety gear requirements, etc.).
Saw some climbers at Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada, and I don't know if they were legal or not.
7690282
Seconded 7690525. I've played it before and it's a lot of fun to play with the family, because everyone is well-educated in different fields, so the logic behind some guesses is even more interesting than the actual correct answer.
7690454
I still haven't figured out what to do with my degree.
The formations down there are really cool, but when your instincts are all 'get away from danger by flying up,' being underground is very frightening.
7691605
Or these days, we'll make a tool that doesn't do it quite as well but has loads of other features so you'll forget that it doesn't actually do its intended function all that well. Take my cell phone--great for navigating, browsing the internet, etc.; not so good for actually making phone calls.
Hah, the way we play if you can find a case of the word being used in English, it's okay, whether or not it's in a dictionary.
7692435
Don't you hate it when you've got a brilliant move and then somebody blocks it with a totally BS move just because they can't think of anything better?
7695057
That would change the meaning.
No, sorry.
7699395
Yes, do! They all sound like fun places to visit.
7735735
I don't think I've ever seen it anywhere outside of PA. But when I was in college, Rolling Rock was one of our favorite beers, because it was both cheap and drinkable.
This intrigues me... what, theoretically, would the closest romanization of the Equestrian word for 'big thundercloud' look like? Based on this paragraph, it has at least 2 Q's, almost certainly a Z, J, and/or X, and maybe even a K for good measure. And yet, the language can be pronounced by native English speaking humans. Is there a human language which might be close in sounds/cadence to what you had in mind for Equestrian?
10331411
This intrigues me... what, theoretically, would the closest romanization of the Equestrian word for 'big thundercloud' look like?
grote stormwolk
Oh, Silver’s totally lying here. She just grabbed the letters she had with the most points and claimed that they spelled a word in Equestrian. It doesn’t rule out that Equestrian is weird (in romanization), since we’ve actually got languages like Welsh that don’t like vowels (ynysbwl, for example [and that made me curious; in Welsh scrabble, Y is worth 1 point, S is worth 3, it doesn’t look like there is a K, Q, or V, and they have some double letters as single tiles (DD, for example, it one point; NG gets you ten]).
Funny you should say that. I didn’t originally have an idea; one of my other stories mentions that Earth Pony has 14 characters and diacritical marks, whereas Unicorn has 44 characters. In the time since, I’ve decided that ponies natively speak Dutch. That was based on a meme which I’d just seen that claimed that ponies “only speak Dutch”, and somebody asking about the same time I saw that meme what the Equestrian language was closest to. . . .
10340048
Sneaky pony.
That's pretty close to my own headcanon, which that they speak something similar to Swedish. The Smile Song works surprisingly well in Swedish:
10341154
It’s not like anybody there would know the difference.
At least it’s not Danish. Nobody knows how to speak Danish, not even the Danes.