Montana Road Trip (part 3)

  This will be my last post about our MT road trip.  The next day after seeing Bannack, we headed over to Nevada City and Virginia City.  In Nevada City we panned for gold.  Nobody struck it rich, but we saw a few tiny flakes of gold.  They were so small you couldn't grab them with your fingers.  It was a fun experience, but not one I would want to do everyday for hours on end.  :)

  After we looked for gold, we stopped at this little bakery to have lunch.  When was the last time you had a meal under a roof like this?

 It was a fun little place.  Dessert was definitely the best part of it.  I had Scottish shortbread, which was really good!

Then we made the guys pose in front of the Saloon.  Haha! 

 Look how tough they look!  ;)

 

 Emma wanted to take a picture with my camera, so I posed for her.  I didn't see until I uploaded my pictures on the computer that my husband was being a goof in the background. 

One of the buildings we visited is said to be the oldest standing school in Montana.

 

After seeing most of Nevada City we headed back over to Virginia City to look around.  They have a small little train that will shuttle you back and forth between the 2 towns.  It takes about 15 minutes, but I think it's only a mile long.  

Here are a couple pictures inside one of the mercantile's.  It was really hard to just view it from far back and not be able to walk around and really look at the things on the shelves.  But I am a rule follower, so I stayed put!  ;)

We wrapped up our visit here by taking a stage coach ride.  Very fun!

 We did make our way towards Butte the next day and then we headed back home.  Four days on the road was perfect.  We had a lot of fun, but we were ready to head home.  We saw and experienced a lot, and really wore our kids out.  :)

Montana Road Trip (Part 2)

  Bannack was probably my favorite stop of the whole trip.  It is such a neat place.  It is an old abandoned mining town.  The street is closed off so you can only walk through it.  Nothing is open in this town except for the visitor center.  Everything else is abandoned.  So neat!

 

These are the old hotel stairs.  Aren't they neat?

The top floor was the masonic temple and the bottom floor of this building was used as the school room.  If you look closely you can see the old merry go round in this picture below.

 

We got the kids to pose for a shot in the old jail. 

And here we got the whole crew lined up in the old bar. This was after spending a few hours walking around the town and the kids were about to drop. 

Isn't it beautiful!?

Montana Road Trip (Part 1)

  My sister Lindy and I decided that out families should take a Montana road trip this summer.  Most of the time when my family has traveled we have traveled out of state.  I don't know why, it just seems to be the way we gravitate.  My parents had taken us kids to see some of these things when we were little, but I was around 3 years old and don't remember any of it.  So it was way past time that I went again. 

 Our first stop was in Philipsburg.  It is a beautiful little town, and one of my favorite stops that we made. 

 

When we got into town, we found a place where we could look for sapphires.  We all had a blast doing this.  Even us big kids.  ;)

 

The sapphires are heavier than the pebbles so when you move them around in the water in this tank, they settle on the bottom of the box.  When you take the box outside and flip it over on the table, you should find most of the sapphires sitting on top of the pile in the middle.  

  None of our sapphires were really worth anything.  But we sure had fun looking.  We found enough  that all of the kids could save some in a small glass container of their own.

  We ate lunch at a really good little BBQ restaurant and then hit up the candy store.  They make fresh salt water taffy there, so the kids loaded up on sugar and we hit the road again.  Next stop... Bannack.  Which was probably my favorite stop of the whole trip.