We woke up bright and early and a little chilly (we were tent camping!) and promptly showered and headed off towards the town of Sumpter, WA. There was an excursion train we planned on riding and Sumpter was having a huge flea market! But first we stopped at the very very small town of Granite. They had a fun sign in town.
Granite, Oregon.
Sumpter Valley Railroad.
I need another bike. You can put this on the rails and go!
We round in the cupola of the caboose! There were four seats at the very top. It was super fun to ride up there.
Across from us was a women with her nephew. She wanted to take out picture because “No one has their photo taken while they’re on vacation any more!” I can’t smile on command.
The train takes you passed all of the old dredging areas from the gold mining days. I think it’s rather an eye sore.
The train arrived in Sumpter so we decided to walk around for a few hours. The train would later take us back to the station outside of town where we parked the car.
The flea market was awesome! There was actual “old” stuff there! In Seattle “old” or “vintage” items are crap.
We found curly fries too.
This reminded me of Pennsylvania.
There were some dudes making kettle corn in an Old West town. What a great surprise though! They were super nice dudes and they make some awesome kettle corn!
Flea market goods.
Don’t stand outside…and be miserable…come inside and get fed up!
The local church was also having a sale!
Look at all of that old camera equipment we found in the church! I bought a Polaroid camera and some old expired film.
Awesome lemonade, awesome stand, awesome old man working inside that large lemon!
An old firetruck.
I had an awesome time walking around and looking at old junk! I think Eric had fun too.
I passed on this fantastic cookie jar. I’m kind of regretting that now.
This hotel was also in the town of Sumpter. We want to stay here the next time we’re in the area!
Here’s a massive dredge that was used for gold mining. This was actually a museum that you could walk around inside. It was huge.
We walked around and waited for our return train…and waited…and waited…and guess what? It broke down! The railroad workers had to drive us back to our car! It was kind of a bummer.
When they took us back to the train station they showed us around their train shed. There were plenty of trains to look at and discuss and plenty of spare train parts.
Awesome van!
It was a little chilly the whole time we were in Oregon!
This is the train that broke down.
This friendly volunteer was telling us about the piece that broke on the train.
East Broad Top is in Pennsylvania! They have a few hopper cars that were from East Broad Top so they repainted the cars and re-stenciled them.
After leaving Sumpter we drove to the Baker City area. We were driving on some old back roads in search of wagon wheel ruts from the Oregon Trail. Most of the back roads are open range so cows and babies were everywhere! The little guy on the left was nursing when we drove by. He stopped nursing to look at us. Mama then nudged him to get him to start nursing again. SUPER CUTE!
And we found those wagon wheel ruts from the Oregon Trail.
We made it back to the campsite before dark and we had time to lay in the tent and look at pictures. We didn’t have a fire pit which was kind of annoying, but I guess you can’t really complain when camping is only $10 a night! And that includes showers!
This was my favorite treasure I found at the flea market. A horse and a squirrel? I couldn’t just leave it there!
Recent comments