St Elmo Ghost Town

We woke up (early) after a pretty decent night of sleep and Michael had a full day planned for us. We got up and dressed and ate breakfast at our camp site. 

Here is our view from the campsite! I cannot even describe how majestic the Rockies are! This is Mount Princeton. 

We set off for our first adventure: St Elmo ghost town which was about 20 miles from our camp. The town was established in 1860 when silver ore and gold were discovered here. It felt just like we were on the set of Little House on the Prairie!  

School's back in session! 

We checked for Nellie Olsen in the mercantile, but she had stepped out. The bottom left pic is the jail! 

We found William's house.

The chipmunks were friendly. And quite hungry. We bought chipmunk food for 50 cents and fed the little rodents. (And by "we", I mean "they."  No thanks!!  I was glad to be the photographer and miss out on that experience.)

Here's city hall. The jail cell was in the back of this building. Michael and I are proud to announce that we took this moment to renew our vows on the steps of city hall.  (Not really.)

Other random thoughts on day 3:

1. My hair looks amazing in Colorado!!! Seriously-- looks like I got a $300 keratin treatment when i am without all the usual humidity of Nashville! If you notice a sudden onslaught of selfies, you'll know it's just that I'm having a really good hair day! 

2.  Camping is a TON of work!  Just to take a shower or go to the bathroom, you have to walk for a few minutes. So inconvenient!  

3.  The sun rises really early here. As you can see in this pic, by about 5:00 am, our tent was very well-lit. No flash was needed to take a picture. 

4.  I am LOVING seeing my kids play together and be creative making up fun new (albeit ridiculously silly at times) games and things to do.  When they don't have other friends around or the constant distraction of TV and video games, they actually get along quite well!  

There are a bunch of rocks and boulders all around our tent site (and thankfully we have no neighbors!) so they've played all over these things. This is them playing a game they called Jungle World. John is the dad, Maddy is the mom and Will is their teenage son who moved out and has his own rock to live on now.