Jan 9, 2008

Waking up.

Detour from old Route 61.

Above: Old Route 61 remains.

Katie's first time on skis.


That's me.

Dinner and research.

Goodnight.

We got up later than we planned on, but got out on the road decently early. We got on Route 22 on our way to Centralia. Cracker Barrel was a nice treat for lunch/breakfast. It was about an hour and a half to Centralia and it took us some time to find the areas we were looking for. Once we found the places we wanted it was awesome. The story is that in the '70s, somehow a fire started in a coal mine that spread quickly and wasn't able to be extinguished. Though many attempts have been made to put it out, it's still burning today and predicted to continue burning for centuries. The ground was smoking in random places and the old highway 61 was cracked and destroyed. There was one giant crack in the ground the stretched about 50 feet and had smoke pouring out of it. We spent quite a while walking around the area and photographing all we could. Once we were done, we headed back the way we came in and got to Blue Mountain. Katie made her first attempt at skiing. She did amazingly well. It was her first time and she hardly fell at all; either she's just a natural or I'm a really good teacher... Anyway, it was a lot of fun until we got back to the car. I couldn't find my keys anywhere. I searched everywhere before resigning that I had lost them. We ended up getting lucky because there is a Bed & Breakfast at the bottom of the mountain and the owner is a nice man that came and picked us up and took us back there. He gave us a discount because he couldn't make us breakfast (we didn't care) and gave me a phone book to find a Nissan dealer. We hung out in our room and ate our wraps from the ski lodge while I looked through the phone book. After exploring the house, since we were alone in it, we went to sleep.