My granddaughter spent the night this past Saturday. The plan for Sunday was to be lazy and maybe bake something. That went out the window at breakfast.

“Mahmó, instead of making cookies and bread, can we go on an adventure?” Well, now that’s a perfect thing for a Sunday afternoon.

She asked if we could hunt ghosts in a town. The thing about ghost towns is people like to write about them on the internet, add picture of old buildings and there is no address. It’s something like go 20.5 miles on State Highway blah blah blah and turn west on County Road blah blah for 1.7 miles then turn down the washed out, never been grated, dirt road.

But, I found one, not too far away and there was almost an address. We were off to Orchard, Colorado to visit the Dearfield, Colorado ghost town.

Orchard is a very small community and it is a unincorporated, but has a post office. It sounded like some of the towns I lived in as a kid.

It was a pretty drive, we sang songs from the Troll movies that are mainly songs from my youth and I apparently sing them wrong 🙄🫤🫠

Lots of small towns and farmland. And a funny machine that “looks like an alien digger”. It was a ditch witch.

We drove through Brighton Colorado. I hadn’t been there yet and it was a cute little town! I want to go back to explore.

My copilot/backseat driver/wannabe dj asked if she could take picture for my “blob”. Here are some of her shots.

(I straightened them a bit)

We finally found Orchard.

I missed the turn to get to Dearfield. I had to turn around to find the tiny sign for the county road.

Dearfield was an African-American settlement founded in 1909 by Oliver Toussaint Jackson. By 1920 there was over 700 residents. The last resident, his niece, died in 1973. There were stores, 2 churches, a hotel, a dance hall, and a restaurant. A very up and coming place.

Because my car robot has mislead and, out and out lied to me, I also had the directions going on my phone. This is the road they BOTH told me to drive down.

So far, no dilapidated buildings of a ghost town.

I drove down a bit further until I was told I had reached my destination. There was also a tiny sign that said “Private” that my co-pilot believes she saw, but I did not see it.

This is what we saw when both robots stated “You have reached your destination” and “You have arrived” and here was out view.

A very confused little girl in the back said “This is not a ghost town!” No it is not. This was out the drivers side. Let’s check the passenger side.

My granddaughter had this whole plan. She had a bottle of water and was going to throw it on the ghosts. I had to explain that Target sells cases of water, but it was just regular water, not Holy Water. Mainly because Target doesn’t sell Holy Water, it’s only available at certain churches, and our church didn’t have it. She is convinced the ghosts disappeared the town because the didn’t really want company.

On the drive out to Orchard, we saw a sign for Ft. Vasquez, in Platteville. So we headed that way.

I had no clue about Ft Vasquez. When we got home, I looked it up and found out some cool things not on the historic plaque.

Ft Vasquez was an 1835 fur-trading fort. The founders Louis Vasquez and Andrew Sublette hired mountain men like Jim Beckwourth and Baptiste Charbonneau at their adobe outpost on the South Platte River that was frequently visited by the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Lakota people. After 1842, it became a way station for wagon trains and stage coaches.

There was an information area and gift shop, but we had a dog with us that had some crazy zoomies. This dog was not going anywhere near a museum or the senior citizen volunteers!

It was a fun adventure inside of an adventure. We had snacks, songs, a maybe sorta kinda invisible ghost town, and a dog with zoomies dragging us around a 100+ year old fort.

And then we were headed home. It was a good day.

The goal is 60 new things before I turn 60 and I have 28 more to go and I can’t wait!