This weekend we headed up the hills to Georgetown to take a ride on the Georgetown Loop Railroad. Logan loves trains but had yet to actually ride on one. Not too shabby for his first train ride to be with a coal-fueled steam engine. 🙂

Logan loved the train ride and watching the cars move along the track. The weather was pretty nice for late May, which in Colorado is pretty unpredictable. It was warm, a bit smokey (from fires in New Mexico) but got increasingly WINDY as the day progressed. By the time we left, there were 70 mph gusts blowing through the canyon!

Our excursion was also newsworthy! A fault of the wind, a small-ish pine tree (5″ diameter / 20′ tall) was uprooted and hit a passenger sitting in one of the open air cars on the head. The ride came to a very abrupt emergency stop and rumors of what happened began to pass through the cars. I think we originally heard there was a deer on the tracks, then we heard a tree fell on the train or the tracks, and finally that a tree had hit a person. It was like a one-sided version of telephone. The person who was hit, was in a car three or four ahead of ours, but by the time the train stopped, the tree was just past our car. I got a photo of it being moved, but it’s not very easy to see, so I won’t post it.

The person was not seriously injured yet when the train stopped in Silver Plume, paramedics were brought aboard and the individual was taken off on a stretcher as a precaution. We were glad we chose to ride in one of the enclosed cars.

After our ride, we had lunch at a great Euro restaurant (German food for the win!) and checked out the donkey race. Bet you didn’t know that donkey racing is the official indigenous sport of Colorado? All of the donkeys were adorned with mining or other frontier supplies: