Fishers Peak Soup Kitchen

Colorado – Thursday, October 17

My donation for today was going to go to the Fishers Peak Soup Kitchen, where they serve lunch every weekday to whoever comes in, plus they distribute other food for the people to take with them. I called to see if they would prefer a financial donation or a food donation, and I talked to Terrie, and she said a financial donation would be wonderful so they could it add it to the funds for the big Christmas dinner with all the fixings. So I drove into Trinidad and found the soup kitchen. They start serving lunch kind of early, at 11:00, and there were quite a few volunteers to help with cooking, serving, cleaning and passing out other food. They have 80-100 people come in to eat every day. I met Terrie, and she introduced me to several of the volunteers. She was so appreciative of the donation that she had written out a thank you card even before I got there! She invited me to have lunch, and I said I didn’t want to eat food that others might need, but she said they had plenty. So they gave me a tray and I enjoyed an early lunch of pasta with meat and cheese, salad, garlic bread and cherry pie for dessert. It was good – better than lunches I would normally eat!

Then Tula and I set off for some walking. We covered 3 miles in Trinidad – an old Spanish town with brick streets and old Victorian buildings, sitting in the shadows of Fishers Peak. This was coal mining country, and they had the last coal-burning steam engine in a park. There was also a Coal Miners Memorial in the center of town, along with a big sculpture of a canary in a cage – a tribute to the birds that saved countless lives in the mines. Miners would often carry a canary into a mine to act as an early warning system for the presence of toxic gases like carbon monoxide, methane or carbon dioxide. Because their heart rate is so high, those gases would quickly kill a canary, but would give the miners time to get to safety. It’s kind of nice there’s a tribute to the canary!

When we were done walking in Trinidad, I drove north to Walsenburg, where we got out for another mile of walking. Then I headed up to Pueblo, which had a good downtown area for walking, plus a riverwalk. Between town and 2 loops of the whole riverwalk, I covered a little over 4 1/2 miles in Pueblo. Then, with darkness falling, Tula and I walked another mile around the big old train station which is now used for special events – it was a big building with beautiful stained glass windows, and we walked up on the bridge to look at all the train tracks, and I was hoping a train would come by, but it didn’t.

By then it was totally dark, and I decided to drive a little farther north to Colorado Springs. It was chilly out, and I’d have to pay attention to snow forecasts since I was now close to the Rockies.