09/19/11

This weekend, my mom, my dad and I went up to a house in the mountains that my grandparents built. I've been going there ever since I was a baby, and my mom since she was a kid herself. It's a very relaxing, serene place. It's fairly remote, there are neighbors one house to the side and a couple other houses, but other than that, it's just the endless woods. You can go days without seeing a soul. In the winter, the only warmth in the house comes from the old woodstove, which uses logs and matches.

After a night of relaxing and reading books, my dad and I went up to a ghost town nearby Idaho Springs. The road was dirt most of the way, and teetered over the edge. Near the top, you could see I-70 miles and miles below, the cars insignificant dots upon a green landscape. In the ghost town, there were several stone foundations and a partly burnt Victorian house. People did still live in the ghost town, and they even promoted tourism with a "ghost town frisbee course". It's rare to find a truly abandoned town, though I've been to a few.

After the ghost town, all of us went around the Georgetown Railroad Loop, a large set of tracks that looped around Silver Plume and back to Georgetown. The train was an old steam engine and ran with the beautiful stench of exhaust, the smoke filtering through the sunlight in the trees, casting skinny rays of light.

It was a fun weekend, though I was more than happy to come home and relax on my laptop.