November of 2003, my company flew me out to Colorado Springs, CO, to hand off code my team had written for a client. For one long day, I trained their developers on the software my team had written. Then, on the second day, by prior agreement with my company, I took a vacation day out in Colorado. Pretty nice of them; all I had to pay for was one night of hotel and car rental, and I got to check the area out on my own.
I got up really early (easy, with the two hour time offset in my favor) and headed out to the Garden of the Gods, the town of Manitou Springs, and up the Pike's Peak cog railway. (Yeah... can't really stay away from the "choo-choos", can I?)