Charleston to San Diego: Day 11
First, this is how the cats are getting along. Gil enjoying the sunroom. :)
Today was a junk collectors dream. We headed up to the mountain town of Jerome after breakfast to explore and see what the tourist mining town had to offer.
First stop was the mining museum. A little parking lot near the entrance let us see some of the old equipment that was used as well as give us very good look down a 1,900 ft mine shaft. You could literally stand on top of the hole with only inches of glass in between you and a very very long way down. The information on the wall compared the depth to the heigh of Empire State building, which is only 1,250 feet high. Quite mind boggling.
As we headed up the hill to see what the mining museum had to offer we passed this building with stacks and stacks of boxes. I couldn't help but peek through a few windows as it looked almost abandoned. Some were opened and contained rocks.
The brown signs took us next to a ghost town, of sorts. I had been here as a kid and vaguely remember the kerosine powered sawmill with it's dragonhead maw of an exhaust pipe puffing noisily away. Gold King Mine is a little out of the main part of town. If you pass rows and rows of old cars and rusting junk you're at the right place.
To get in we had to go through the gift shop. Outside once more Anson and I were in heaven, taking pictures of anything that had an old label or things we had never seen before. You know we love old, rusting, abandoned things. The ghost town part of the place was mostly old buildings filled to the brim with themed items. There was a barber shop, a cobblers shop, mechanics, jail, and a brothel up on the hill that you couldn't go into with a very strange mannequin leaning from the balcony. Just as well I suppose as I don't think I'd want to look at what was in there.
After the buildings end is where the cars begin, though there were still quite a few interspersed amongst the buildings as well. Anson started a bit of a project, going around and photographing the front of each, not sure about every one, of the cars or trucks. It was really interesting seeing all the eras and their different conditions. Here are a few I picked out to share. There are more we have uploaded to Flickr if you care to see the complete "collection". Here it is!
