Road Trip!

We got a little crazy one day last week and left town!

Three and a half hours later we arrived at Bodie! What is Bodie you ask? A famous ghost town in the California mountains! I have always been into things like this, and even have watched a couple documentaries on Bodie with my step dad back in high school. But I have to tell you, this was WAY MORE AMAZING then I could have imagined!

One of the things that made this all the more awesome was in my genealogy crazed studying I learned that my great-grandfather Frank worked at different things and one of them was mining. He, Grandma Ruth, my grandpa and his two older sisters would have lived in a town very much like Bodie. In fact They lived in Standardville, Ut. owned and run by The Standard mine company the same company who's mine employed Bodie. It was neat to imagine my grandfather running around streets like this and going to a school like the one here. It was also scary and heartbreaking to imagine grandma Ruth living somewhere just like here without much medical help so far removed and watch her 13 year old daughter die from juvenile diabetes.
 

 

We were blessed with beautiful weather, the thunderclouds moving in gave us much appreciated shade! Weather in Bodie is crazy, it regularly freezes during the summer, but it is in the high desert and gets high temperatures. In the winter it can get to -30! Nothing but hops grew for the people who lived there, everything was brought in from outside!

In the museum it was neat to see the payroll books and again made me think of great-grandpa Frank and what he might have done or not done with his paycheck (there were 46 bars in Bodie at it's height!).

The interesting things to see in the museum were nothing like the houses, you could not go into most but you could peek into the windows and see all the things just suspended in time. Left there decades ago. It was fascinating, ere, fun, and sad all at once!

Here is the mine where the men and boys worked. You had to be 16 to work in the Bodie mine, unusually old for that time in history.
It was a wonderful trip, even with the long drive and the (pain inducing) park entry fee. We will be back!

Then we started the drive back!

It was fun to see the sliver of Mono Lake on the road to Bodie it is one of our favorites (Dan still has not been there!)!

And to make it all the more blissful we got a most wonderful rain storm that followed us from Bodie almost to Minden! It had started to sprinkle on us as we left Bodie but on the road it just poured and poured! I am not sure there is a more beautiful drive as 395 from Bishop to Minden!