Trip to the skating rink at Apex Center in Arvada, Colorado - Sunday 7th Nov, 2004
I've made many trips to the ice skating rink at the Apex Center in the township of Arvada, about 20 minutes drive south of Boulder. This time, I decided to take some photos of the scenery along the way. Unfortunately, it was only 2:30 pm in the afternoon so the landscape looked a little plain in colour at that time of day. The best times to take photos is when the sun sets. That's when the scenery turns a very nice red colour, including the sky. I pulled over onto the side of the road along the way to capture a few nice scenes. The fields and plains are part of the natural scenery between the towns and cities. To the west are the big mountains where the scenery is quite different.
Some of the small hills in the north-west direction, part of the Rocky Mountains.
A slightly zoomed-in view of the hills. These hills don't seem too spectacular, but there's lots of that dried up yellow coloured grass covering the plains. The white colour on the mountains toward the right of the photo is due to fresh snow.
Looking towards the south-west, a hill in the background with a flat top. The word for these kinds of hills with a flat top is 'mesa'...pronounced 'may-sar'.
This was a scenic car-photo opportunity with nice background scenery.
Another scenic car-photo picture, where the distant background in the east shows the edge of the city of Arvada. That's where I was headed to. The white streaks in the sky in the left part of the picture are very commonly seen in Colorado. The streaks are caused by passenger airplanes, where the hot air and other things from the engines mixes with cold moist air to form these streaky clouds.
A photo of the street sign photographed from the Apex Center 13150 West 72nd Avenue in Arvada. The Apex Center is a really big recreational center. They have lots of things inside the complex, like a water-park with tube-slides, fitness gyms, aerobics gym, arcade games, indoor climbing gym, and two large ice skating rinks.
This is one of the ice skating rinks inside the Apex Center. The machine on the rink is called a Zamboni (pronounced Zam-bone-eee). It's a electric-powered car that scrapes and washes the ice to make the surface very smooth again at the end of each ice skating session. The Zamboni is named after the person that invented it in the USA. These machines are now seen in ice rinks all around the world, with different models. Some are very colourful.
One more view of the ice rink.
