Durango, Day 6

The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad (or D&SNGRR, for short, because that's better) runs all year.  Turns out that it doesn't go all the way to Silverton all year, but no matter.  Dad scored us tickets in the glass-roofed train car, and we hopped on and enjoyed the ride to Cascade, which was as far as you can go this time of winter.

The station in Durango

Our ride!

If you look closely, you can see our Polar Express locomotive

Looking down on the Animas River

Just looking down (that's actually the foamy river down there)

We had to stop and load up some extra water at Tank Creek

Before we left, we stopped at Bread and picked up a couple of sandwiches and a few bags of chips for lunch.  We noshed during the last bit of our ride to Cascade, which gave us the whole time the train was stopped, a half hour or so, to explore the Cascade Creek wye and the valley alongside the tracks.

Looking up Cascade Creek from the footbridge

There's the fire that kept us moving

Our intrepid (not-so-)little locomotive, #486

And the heavy duty machinery that moved us up the valley

Dad picked up a geological map of the route in the gift shop, and it was fun to read it and say big words and pretend like I knew what I was talking about.  That was fun, because rocks are cool.  And so are trains, for that matter.  I spent lots of time out on the platform just listening to the clackety-clack and we trundled back down the hillside.

Looking for his sleigh.  Or maybe some of the food that's in that bucket.

When we found ourselves back in civilization, we finished up our shopping then called D for a ride home.  She brought Keystone and Roxy, but that wasn't quite enough for Keys.  He missed his peeps and decided it was necessary to clamber over the back seat and be part of the, um, dogpile.

We celebrated my birthday that night with a lovely dinner at Seasons, which was quite tasty.  D and I shared the hoisin-glazed ribs as an appetizer, and then I filled up on the delicious lobster risotto.  That would have been plenty, but we were celebrating my birthday - so I capped it off with a cranberry-orange linzer torte.  Never heard of such a thing before, but it sure was a good idea!