48 hours in Colorado Springs in the WINTER: Things to do + local food!

we're currently experiencing winter van life for the first time and we have made it back to Colorado a state that we have spent a lot of time exploring in the summer but never in the winter so over the next couple weeks we're going to change that and we're kicking off our time here in Colorado Springs for a mix of red rocks and Mountain views delicious Local eats heart pumping climbs and wandering through a magical Winter Wonderland we are having the freaking Time Of Our Lives so our time here in Colorado Springs started off a bit more exciting than we expected yesterday a snowstorm blew in literally the winds were crazy and it covered the area with snow it was so beautiful and a ton of fun to play in but it did mess up our plans a bit so with the key word of winter van life being flexibility we rearranged some things and now we can finally begin exploring the area we just stopped into a super cool local coffee shop called Loyal coffee for some coffee and breakfast this might be the most beautiful avocado toast I've ever seen and the most delicious and now we're off to Garden of the Gods it looks so pretty with all of the snow it's safe to say Kona loves the snow [Music] too Garden of the Gods is famous famous for its striking orange Sandstone formations which began forming hundreds of millions of years ago this area used to be home to the ancestral Rockies a mountain range that precedes today's Rocky Mountains and as these mountains eroded they left sediment which through a variety of other events over time compacted into sandstone and when the modern-day Rockies began forming 65 million years ago the area's fault line caused the Sandstone to shift into what you see today A beautiful contrast of orange rocks against the towering Snowy Peaks behind them it is really neat to be able to walk between these rocks if you blindfolded me and dropped me here I would think I was hiking in Utah with all these fiery orange rocks surrounding [Music] me besides the scenery one awesome thing about this park is that it is totally free to visit back when this park was gifted to the City of Colorado Springs one rule is that it always had to remain free and another rule is that it always had to be called Garden of the Gods this name came to be in the 1800s when some surveyors visited the area one surveyor said this would be a great place for a beer garden while the other surveyor exclaimed beer garden this is a place fit for the gods to assemble we shall call it Garden of the Gods and it has been called Garden of the Gods ever since there's also a rule that alcohol cannot be sold in the park so it's safe to say the one surveyor did not get his wish [Music] there are tons of trails in the park and we kind of created our own adventure so we'll link our all trails in the description below if you want to do what we [Music] did oh baby we've headed a few minutes down the road to Old Colorado City this area was established during the Pikes Peak Gold Rush In 1859 and became the first permanent town in the region before becoming part of Colorado Springs in 1917 it has a cute little down toown area with historic buildings shops and restaurants and for lunch we came to Mon's paperia for some papusas if you're unfamiliar with papusas they are corn cakes that are the national dish of El Salvador and they're typically filled with meat cheese or beans they have a ton of different filling options we got two standard ones here and then we also got a papusa Avalanche that's stuffed with spicy Carnitas topped with alpastor and silky smooth luscious queso they are much bigger than I thought they'd be this plate yeah this plate is oh heavy had store-bought papusas before but these look way way better oh my gosh the meat is super flavorful queso is delicious got some other like onions and tomatoes on there that add a little freshness but man the papoa this is the perfect vessel to soak up all those flavors we need to find more papusas along the way oh my God gosh it's still nice and crispy on the top oh it's so gooey it's kind of a mix of a bunch of different foods kind of like taco flavors pancake form and then also kind of a a quesadilla kind of texture to it and all of those are the best and all of those foods are amazing these are so good this is one of my new favorite foods [Music] we just drove about an hour to the small mining town of Creek and man this has to be one of the most beautiful mining towns we have ever seen there are so many pristine historic buildings and the drive out here was spectacular with so many views of the Rocky Mountains but we aren't here to explore its mining history in the winter time this town becomes home to something pretty cool a company called Ice Castles creates Ice Castles in a handful of locations in the US every winter and they're just so happen to be one near Colorado Springs this year so we had to come check it out there are Ice Castles Caverns tunnels sculptures a bar and a slide to explore and it's all created by hand from professional ice artists with 10,000 icicles grown and hand placed every day and when they're finished there is 25 million PBS of ice we're only 60 seconds into this and it's against the rules but it's so hard to resist not to touch and break them off I'm more afraid that one of these extremely sharp and pointy icicles is going to fall onto me and hurt me wow [Music] it is a whole other world back here this is so cool there's two tiny tiny tiny little tunnels that I guess you get to crawl through oh gosh of course we're going to do it you got to crawl oh no I almost had to belly crawl to get in here this is kind of scary oh wow not for the claustrophobic where are you hey hey this ground is not soft it's just icy woo rookie mistake we forgot our gloves oh that's cold we're just in this ice room like a igloo W this is a thigh workout [Music] that was so fun all right it's slide time this is one of the things I've been most excited for here oh my God that's awesome that was way faster than I thought it would be that was exhilarating that was so fun I'm going to do that like 10 more times at least Ready set go [Applause] W there's another slide call the sky slidee this one looks a bit steeper we had read some sort of mixed reviews about this place but we are having the freaking Time Of Our [Music] Lives you have to book a timed entry ticket to visit we chose to come in the late afternoon which we highly recommend because not only did we get to see the Ice Castles during the day but now that it's dark some of them are lit up with different colors one more round on the slide before we go [Music] this morning we're tackling the manitu incline this is a hike that's actually more like a giant StairMaster as you gain 2,000 ft in just over a mile as you climb 2,744 steps we're having to put on our spikes this morning because it looks pretty icy all right you ready to do this I hope so ready as I'll ever be I want to do it cuz I'm cold got to warm up [Music] yeah we are only a few minutes in and I'm already F and popping so apparently hiking an incline is comparable to climbing up the Empire State Building the Eiffel Tower twice Washington Monument three times and the Statue of Liberty six times we saw the trail from the road the other day and could not believe how steep it was it's basically like straight up it gets way steeper up there too towards the end we have reached step 500 we've already seen several locals you know already doing their first or second Maybe third lap of this morning running it running it that is wild I sign at the trail head had all the records for people doing the incline and it says the most in one day was 22 [Music] [Applause] times so the incline was originally a railway built in 1907 and used to transport construction materials up to a hydroelectric plant and water line being built and once construction was done it was converted into a tourist attraction where people actually rode a car up to the top which looks like it was so much fun but in 1990 it closed down and the rails were removed leaving just the rail road ties and becoming a Super popular hike so popular that you now have to get a free timed reservation to be able to hike it [Music] oh it's definitely getting tougher it's getting steeper and steeper down towards the beginning you check off 100 steps pretty quickly but now every 100 steps is taking so much longer feel like I'm starting to crawl up having to use my hands cuz the steps are so steep this part almost feels like a ladder the last few step counters have been covered in ice so I haven't been able to tell where we're at but the next one coming up is 2600 so we're almost there 44 more to go last step yes I'm so tired down she goes I feel suck all right our goal was to get up here in an hour and a half and our official time was an hour 18 and 42 seconds we did it we did it so cold and hard we did see people going down the steps but there is an alternative Trail you can do called the bar Trail which is what we're going to do because it just seems a whole lot [Music] easier I definitely want to come back and do this multiple times not in one day just to see how much we can shave off of our time coming into this I felt like I was pretty fit but this gave me a big fat slice of Humble Pie and for the record the men's record going up the incline is about 17 minutes and some change and the women's is around 20 minutes we got a long way to go but I think we could at least get it under an hour for [Music] sure the manitu incline is located in manitu Springs a Charming Resort Town located along a Creek with tons of shops and restaurants and as the name implies it's also home to some Mineral Springs including some that you can actually drink from M oh god oh gosh that's disgusting this tastes a lot like the Beverly at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta which is the worst soda at that whole place worst soda I've ever had oh it says it has high levels of mang manganese and it says basically like you can have a sit but don't just drink this as your only source of water because it's too much I don't know if that's what's making it taste bad it does have a little bit of carbonation to it at least it feels like it's almost like kind of sweet do not recommend [Music] we are in desperate need of some fuel so we came to a spot in town called The Loft for some Bagel sandwiches so I got the bunme sunrise which has cheese egg and a bunme mix that has carrots pickled onions a bunch of cilantro that's a good solid fluffy chewy Bagel that mix is kind of spicy though also oh man that's really spicy also that egg nice and fluffy too and I got the Prince Caspian which that's cream cheese avocado pickled onions and then their homemade chili oil which it is dripping in oh you got a little chili oil on your face there oh that is so good and also from our seat we can admire our achievement there's the top of the [Music] incline and now it's time for a blast from the past we're at the manitu Springs p arcade which has hundreds of games spread out through a bunch of buildings like a whole city block it seems like some dating back all the way to the 1900s I don't know how many of these games actually cost a penny but we're limiting ourselves to $10 so we'll see how long it lasts [Music] us I have not played this in Forever all right I'm going to measure my sex appeal Love T Love Tester harmless and clammy oh no I think you're hot stuff babe see if I have any better luck on my sex appeal on this machine 132 yes that's pretty good I'm an angel baby oh that's a hers Romeo and wild and crazy what a shot yes what a shot let's go oh woohoo not again come closer and listen to what Zar has to tell you dream as if you'll live forever live as if you'll die today that's right you must live your days as if they were your last because one day they will be you know what I mean so go on have fun we actually got a lot for our money we have $2.50 left I figure we'll just save it for laundry money we always need quarters for laundry that was so much fun it was just so nostalgic and made us feel like kids again and I have a feeling our next stop will as well all right y'all we have headed back to school this is the Ivy Wild school which is a former Elementary School that was was open from 1916 to 2009 and after it closed it was converted into a marketplace with different restaurants bars and shops but despite being repurposed it still feels like a school they have all these kid paintings blackboards old classroom doors we found some lockers downstairs old water fountains and you can even go in the gym does this bring back lots of memories this is a little smaller of a gym than I'm used to but hardwood floors I like yeah this is awesome for those of you that don't know Adam was a teacher for 6 years and most of that was spent teaching PE so this is where he'd be hanging out and back in elementary school this is where I would be in all of the school [Music] plays they also have an art vending machine this is a repurpose cigarette vending machine and for five bucks you can pick out some [Music] art picked the wild animal it's an arvar or an an eater and I stand corrected this is a baby taper tapier I've never heard of this and what makes it even cooler is that all the proceeds from the sales of these blocks and some other art on her website are donated to organizations that help wild animals hey you quit scratching on the desk get to the principal's [Music] office it turns out being not is a lot of fun at The Ivy Wild school because the principal's office is actually a bar with cocktails mocktails and coffee so instead of getting detention you get drinks and they even have some fun School themed named drinks like bandgeek teachers pet and extra credit and we got two of their mocktails this is the balers brew and this is the Great White Buffalo they have a bunch of stuff in them that we don't we don't remember a lot of ingredients ooh that one o that one's really good that one has non-alcoholic wine in it it tastes like wine ooh it's fizzy fruity sweet I just love that more places are upping their mocktail game I love love love mocktails I have a feeling if principal offices were anything like this there'd be a lot more kids in the principal's office they'd be eager to get in trouble I never went to the principal's office as a kid I was a very well- behaved student always did my homework never was late to class was quiet just did not like getting in trouble I say it's kind of fun thank you for calling bikes Peak America's mountain today is Monday the 3rd of February at 9:00 in the morning our Highway will be starting today open 13 of the 19 miles the top six miles to the summit are closed due to high winds we had hoped to drive up Pikes Peak today which is one of only two 14ers which are mountains over 14,000 ft you can actually drive up in Colorado the road is technically open in the winter but how far you can go depends on the conditions and after the snowstorm we had a few days ago the summit has not reopened so that's going to do it for our time here in Colorado Springs even without Pikes Peak we still had a blast here but the goal of our road trip is to see a lot of snow and experience a true winter so we're off to the mountains [Music]