day 33

today would be our first rest day in awhile, so what did we do? we walked 16+ miles around colorado springs. we went to the coffee shop that eric works at and tried some mai tai (some sort of tea) which was really good and tried some espresso, but both evan and i don't drink coffee so we didn't like it so much. it is a cool coffee shop where they get bags of raw beans and they turn it into their own coffee and ship it out to places all over. we then decided to walk to the garden of the gods which has come highly recommended from other people. so we headed that way and stopped at a safeway to pickup some food while we walked since it was going to be a lot of walking. we finally arrived at the garden of the gods and it was free which was a plus and it was pretty cool seeing these large rocks jutting out of the earth just in this one spot. there were some guys rock climbing up some of them which was neat to watch but for the most part we just wandered around soaking it in. after a good amount of time there we went up to the visitor center then started making our way back to downtown co springs. we walked through a lot of residential and into a older little downtown that was business taking over nice houses. we reached downtown and caught a great sunset while we went in search of food. finding a cheap place to eat is very hard in colorado springs if you don't have a car, we still haven't even found another grocery store other than that safeway that was like 6 or 7 miles away! we went passed downtown and headed back to eric's house hoping there might be a cheap restaurant passed his house but no luck. we went back to eric's house and grabbed our bikes to go a little faster in our search; we finally came across a great burger and shake place open later (everything seems to close at 9 around here). we enjoyed a big burger, fries, and a shake then headed back home. we should be keeping a burger count since we eat so many! got back to eric's and just chatted with him for a long time till we all crashed about 2am.