April 24, 2022 - Day 7: Falcon, CO -- Colorado Springs, CO 刚刚开放的最新的高科技奥林匹克博物馆

Olympic Museum, just opened one month ago. Very high tech

The Olympic metals. we were in 2018 Olympic in Beijing.

Racing in Olympic track

Mid-morning we drove downtown to the US Olympic and Paralympic museum, where we met Martin. He had worked with my dad when they were students, and hadn’t seen each other for twenty years. They also happened to share a birthday. He wore a black mask with a smiling row of sharp, white teeth printed on it.

The Olympic/Paralympic had only been established in the past year. I felt like we were given a peek of how exhibits would be in the future - interactive based on a profile created online. When we walked to each exhibit, the screen explanation would sense our RFID tags hung around our necks and personalize the font, style, and sometimes our favorite sport based on the profile. Each person was also given a stylus to avoid contact with touch screens. In one room, museum-goers could try their hand at several sports - skeleton, leaning on a board to steer down a pipe of snow on a screen, or skiing, similar to how Wii games work.

Although the experience was supposedly personalized, when I compare it to the Radio museum when Tom gave us a personal tour, the Olympic museum feels a little cold and robotic; sleek and seamless though it was. Technology can replace many things but one thing it cannot is human connection. The museum overall seemed geared towards children. Having known a paralympic athlete (downhill skier with Downs Syndrome), I paid particular attention to the integration of parathletes. One quote stood out to me: it wrote something like “a para athlete is someone who seeks to excel at their chosen sport who also happens to have a physical or visual disability.” Throughout the museum, it echoed this sentiment; they were athletes first and their disability was simply something about them.

We had lunch at a pizzeria called the White Pie. Their pizzas were baked with thin crust and charred dough bubbles, reminding me of the authentic italian brick-oven pizzas from Ceritano’s in Blacksburg. My mom ordered a beef carpaccio and marveled at the thin slices of tenderloin; they had to scrape it from the plate with their forks and my mother called the proportions “ridiculous.”

After lunch, our friend Martin and his partner Sarah met us at our campsite, Garden of the Gods RV site to look at our hookup as they are also considering an RV. They led us through the park Garden of the Gods. We had to carry Chocho’s stroller across the rocky red soil in places as we hiked upward into the bright sun and dry landscape. The rocks were red mounds balanced against the blue sky, while the idyllic scene contrasted with the horse poop every few feet on the road and its smell. We saw the horses in the park and the ranch was right by our campsite. The days are finally getting warmer. There is an unexpectedly large number of children in this site and they called out to us and our dog as they went by on bikes, having a conversation with me as they swung on swings.

The middle one is the 2018 Olympic torch, we were in Beijing watches several games.

with Martine and his girl friend hiking

I am drawing myself at the museum

Friend introduced this food to us