McCashland Family Vacation, Day 8 - Bishop Castle

Today involved a dragon, rainy lake day, and being 9200 feet above sea level.  Let's dive right in!

As before mentioned, part of Travis's job is to oversee the local scout camp.  Preferably, he has a camp director on site to do it so he can run the behind the scene things from his office in Pueblo.  He wanted to show us a couple places around his camp in the mountains, so that was the plan for the day.  San Isabel Scout Ranch is about an hour southwest of Pueblo.  We loaded up around 10:00 and headed for the mountains.  

Our first stop was a place called Bishop Castle (my pictures don't do it justice, so click through to the website).  They tried telling us about this place, but none of it made sense until we got there.  Bishop Castle is a one-man project named after its creator, Jim Bishop.  Bishop has been building this castle for nearly 60 years by himself, and it's always open for free to the public.  It's a really cool place from afar, but pretty sketchy up close.  For anyone that's fans of Harry Potter, it reminded me a lot of the Weasley's house.  It looked like parts just kept being added haphazardly here and there until it reached it's current state.  It doesn't look like there was any long term plan involved in the construction of it but was added to one section at a time.  It's a weird place, but the kids enjoyed it.

After the castle, we went to Travis's scout camp to change into our swimsuits.  It's fun seeing other camps and how they are set up.  And apparently you can see Kansas from there too!!  It helps that the camp is over 9000 feet above sea level, but hey... We then ventured to San Isabel Lake.  It's technically a lake, but it's really an oversized pond.  We unfortunately picked a day and time where the weather didn't want to cooperate.  We were there long enough to walk our chairs to the shore and pull out our lunches to start eating before the skies opened.  We packed it all back up and sat in the cars for 20 minutes just to see if it was going to pass before calling it a day.  The kids were bummed, and so were we.  That's how the cookie crumbles sometimes.

Hey look, it's Kansas!!

San Isabel Lake

After changing out of our swimsuits we went back to their house for some hanging out.  We had a barbecue and the kids played the rest of the evening.  Their neighbors were setting off fireworks for close to four hours straight.  And because of where our trailer is parked, we were everyone's neighbors.  We were waking up to fireworks until 11:30, and they may have continued past then.  Eh, it's the one day of the year that everyone enjoys exploding things, so I guess I can't be too grumpy about it.  Tomorrow is Sunday and should be pretty lowkey, so I don't think I'll write about it.  Monday morning our plan is to pack up and leave by around 8:00 to Albuquerque as we start the second half of our trip.  Until then, thanks for reading!!!!