Update: (Keith’s photos) As promised, Keith’s photos are below. Trying to figure out which wifi/how things upload/what settings on each thing at each place is best is sometimes creates these kind of annoying re-dos.
We woke up late and my crick is getting better so I did my workout with a mountain view! The girls got up and bothered me until we figured out that journaling with our new markers was really exciting. Anna was particularly excited because we made pancakes after and went right back to drawing her picture. We went to the playground and then off to lunch in Virginia City.
Virginia City was an interesting historical tourist attraction. The train had a good tour on the ride back where we learned why the land looks the way it does. We had been talking about the hills on the side of the road looking like they had been dug up and low and behold this is gold rush territory. The dredges tore up the ground, trees and roots and all, leaving piles of deep rock called tailings. The mountains on either side of the valley are beautiful, but the land between has been through a lot, even the “lakes” in the area are full of rusted old mines. This area was known for garnets and gold in its heyday. There was talk of Jack, the conductor of the pony express and the football field dredges that dig up the rock to what would amount to billions in gold today.
Things we did:
- Made pancakes!
- Wrote/drew in our journals (we got new retractable washable markers (no losing the caps? No drying out? We will see!)
- Went to the playground
- Went to Virginia City (a historical landmark of the old town) and had lunch
- Went in all the stores because we told the girls they could have a $5 trinket (Elsa picked unicorn socks and Anna picked a tiny unicorn journal with a pen) – Mom picked the wooden snake.
- Saw lots of mannequins and old things in the general stores, dress stores, and banks. Anna said, “Maybe the people were frozen with a pew-pew gun and that is why they can’t move.” (I wasn’t sure if she had ever seen a mannequin before, so we explained they were just big dolls telling the story just in case).
- Keith and I got some beers at a local Saloon and the girls put on a show for us.
- Took a honky-tonk train ride (Saw the horse and carriage you could take, the “cabbage patch” and their houses/toilet (which apparently is where the Asian community lived), a dredge, tailing piles, lakes, a creek, a waterfall, and old wooden trains
- Went into an old arcade
- Saw an old bank vault
- Made some pasta to pour our soup from the other night over
As always: Make sure you wait for the photos and captions to load below! If the photos are too small and you want to zoom in don’t forget you can Cmd+/- on a Mac or Cntl+/- on a PC to zoom in/out your browser!
Love all the expressions on everyone’s faces. I was just thinking the Keith and Tara are about the age when Paul and I (and children) started taking “real” vacations–as opposed to visiting relatives. Visiting is nice–but exploring and adventuring (IMHO) is the real thing.