Odometer: 26,169

The plan for today is to drive up to Pikes Peak. But somehow we and/or our navigation lady miss a turn and we end up at the back of Pikes Peak in Victor. Victor is a small country side village with a lot of old mines. They were all built around 1890 and some of them were in use until around 1940.

We see a gravel road on our map and ask for directions because we cannot see any signs. With some help we eventually find it and start closing our circle around Pikes Peak. We follow wonderful creeks, we see horse properties and cattle grazing up on the mountain meadows and we see a young male deer. The whole Gold Camp Road is probably about 30 miles long, but we enjoy every part of it.

At exactly 5pm we drive into the parking lot of “Edelweiss”, a German restaurant (Marco found a flyer from them at the Hotel last night and we feel we haven’t had any European Cuisine for a while). I order a Jaegerschnitzel with Spaetzle and Marco has Sauerbraten with Knoedel. The atmosphere is very German with all German songs playing in the background, but the food was rather mediocre – very different from the american food we had the last few days, but not necessarily better.

We return to the America’s Best Value Inn where we were last night already. We are sure that our tour was much nicer than if we had got the right road up to the peak with all the other people. We enjoyed the solitude and all the beautiful things we saw.