Colorado

I'm a North Carolina native, a Tar Heel through and through. Heck, I was even born on the campus of the University of North Carolina, the nation's oldest university. No, I was not born during its first few years of existence.

Colorado has been home for a long, long time, ever since my family moved here when I was a kid. Today, I'm going to show you one very good reason why I love it here.

This, my friends, is this morning's sky. It's only about 3% of it, but it all looks just like this as of this moment.

We have days like this a lot here. The tourist attraction folks (I don't mean the strange-looking people at the circus--I'm talking about the PR folks selling Colorado as a destination for vacationing) claim we get 300 days of sun a year. I don't know how accurate that is, as my wife and I suspect that five seconds of sunlight during an otherwise gloomy day may qualify for the Board of Tourism's list of 300 days.

It hardly matters. We get lots of sun, regardless of how you tally it up.

For a frame of reference, here is a second picture with the tops of a couple of trees visible in the bottom of the frame.As one's eye approaches the horizon, the blue lightens. You can see it in this picture. If you look straight up, and the first photo was taken almost straight up, you see the deep, deep blue of the sky when you are a mile above sea level. That first mile of atmosphere which you look through in Chapel Hill but which we are above here makes a big difference.

In North Carolina, the sky is Carolina blue. I love Carolina blue. Here in Denver, today in particular, you can see Colorado blue. There aren't many places in the country where you can see a sky so deeply colored, so entrancingly inviting to the eye. You can get lost in that blue.