My granddaughter just returned from visiting her other grandparents and on Friday afternoon she was knocking on my door, ready to spend the night!

After breakfast, this morning she couldn’t decide on if we should bake cookies or bread. Suddenly she jumped up and announced to the dog and I that we should have an adventure day. So I looked up “ghost towns” in Colorado and of course the Caribou ghost town and mine popped up. If you remember, I wrote a post about that. But there was this blog about ghost towns and it gave really good directions except for the part that said turn west and go 0.4 miles.

So we set off to find a ghost town!

My granddaughter asked me how many adventures had her and I been on. I thought it was a sweet question, and I told her so far this year we had been on quite a few, but overall, we had a bunch of them. She wanted to have adventures everyday, but couldn’t drive. I told her new adventures can be a new thing, a new experience and it is all an adventure. It could be finding a beautiful flower, an interesting rock, a cool looking cloud, a really pretty house, a good book…these things can be adventures too, small ones but an adventure all the same. Soon she was finding unicorns, babies, trees and stars in the clouds.

As we started our climb, she looked out over the horizon and exclaimed the God did a really good job on this right here! I love her little heart to bits! And the views are always stunning and she wasn’t wrong, God did do a great job.

This morning, I read that Colorado had more ghost towns than any other state. It makes sense given the amount of gold, silver, and iron ore mines here.

As we drove along, Sofia began to clap and cheer, “A squiggle sign, Mhàmo! That means a good turn is coming!”

This is the sign with the squiggle…

We followed the directions, but on the way, there was a dirt road that looked promising, so I made a right turn. We followed it to a one lane bridge that crossed a lovely creek.

The road found its way back to the road we were driving on before. Also, we went 3.1 miles too far. I was supposed to turn only after 0.4 miles. I had to turn around somewhere, didn’t I?

I think when I put directions to Caribou into my nav robot, it misunderstood and sent us to Caribou Ranch instead of the mine and ghost town.

As we drove around, hoping the open space would lead us in the right direction, we suddenly came upon a residential area, then we were driving in the path of one of the recent fires. There were 4 that were not so far away from me, and it appeared it was closer than the others.

We had our windows down and we suddenly were hit with the acrid smell of the smoke. It was already sticking to us. We rolled are windows up and the doggo began to sneeze and cough. We just fell into silence, speaking in hushed tones. The trees were gone. The lush forest of Aspens and Pines now charred and broken. I had not heard if this was an accident or gross human error. One of the fires were started by fireworks. Sparks and natural tinder sets it off like a rocket. Sofia said she wanted to pray for the firemen and the people and animals. She was worried if kids were hurt too, and decided to add them to her prayer list just in case.

We did not find a ghost town, but my daughter reminded me that ghost are invisible, so I should have known. She might be right, but we still had a nice afternoon of an adventure!

The goal is 60 new things before I turn 60 and I have 30 more to go and I can’t wait!

(Halfway There)