Kit Carson Carousel and Over the Air HDTV

We spent a day in Burlington, Colorado on the Eastern plains near the Colorado / Kansas border. Burlington is the home of the Kit Carson Carousel - a fully restored carousel manufactured by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company in the early 1900s. In fact, this was the 6th carousel built by PTC and the only surviving menagerie built by them. (A menagerie carousel has animals besides horses). It is housed in its own 12-sided building and is operated during the summer for only 25 cents per ride. The carousel does not having jumping animals, but makes up for it by turning up the speed. You can also enjoy listening to the Wurlitzer Monster Military Band Organ both in person and on-line on their website. If you like historic carousels, this is a nice one to visit.

We also spent some time at the Old Town Museum in Burlington. To get there, we took a horse-pulled wagon from the Carousel to the Museum, courtesy of Verlin Garner of 2AM Ranch. He was quite a character! Jenny and Robert got to sit up front and Robert even got to drive the horses (Ginger and Buddy) for a ways!

The Old Town Museum contains both an indoor and outdoor area. Inside, there are a large number of ranching / farming artifacts as well as older vehicles and farming tools. Did you know that you could identify fence owners by the pattern / style of barbs in the barb wire? Some of the more interesting exhibits for me were the turn-of-the-century textile displays. There were looms, sewing machines, a lace-making display, and quite a few garments made at the time. Thank goodness we don't have to hand-make our own clothes anymore (unless we choose to, of course).

Outside are a large number of restored buildings containing displays of various types. Some of the more interesting buildings were the sod house (imagine living in that), a manor house, the general store, and the drug store. For my husband, the car-lover, he enjoyed the "Texaco" building as well. Did you know that the soda-fountains were first located within drug stores because drug stores sold carbonated water as part of their offerings?

We enjoyed our visit to Burlington and would certainly encourage a visit to the Carousel and the Old Town Museum if you like those sorts of things.

Over-the-Air HDTV

Here in the Denver area, the new HDTV broadcasting antenna on Lookout Mountain has been up and running now since late May. These broadcasts had been coming from a different antenna at a lower power for some time earlier, but we had not been able to receive those signals up until now. Of course, what I fail to mention is that the UHF antenna makes a big difference.

We purchased a Samsung DTBH260F HDTV Terrestrial Receiver last Christmas, hoping to get those free over-the-air signals. We also had a UHF antenna purchased on a whim. These two items, combined, failed to work. So we waited until the new high-power antenna was up and running. Again, the receiver / antenna combination just wasn't working. But on the advice of a good friend who really enjoys these sorts of things and a local Best Buy employee, we purchased a different antenna - a Terk HDTVa Indoor Amplified High-Definition Antenna. Lo-and-behold we now get a signal and more stations than we were getting with our old rabbit-ears! What a marvelous thing it is - modern technology!

Mind you, the antenna really needs to be pointing in the right direction, but if you know where Golden is compared to where you live, then you'll probably do just fine. And according to our friend, even those in Fort Collins can get the over-the-air signals using an outdoor UHF antenna. Amazing.