Empire Mine

On Monday we took advantage of another beautiful day off to do some exploring a little closer to home. Gold was discovered around here in 1848 and there are tons of gold mines within just a few miles of our house. So we decided to go to the Empire Gold Mine.

Here's the Queen of Sheba herself, Addison. Matt put his sunglasses on her, but like just about everything else on her head/face, she quickly took them off.



"Here, I don't need these."
They've got cool old machinery set up to look at, and in our case, climb on.


Addie thought she'd check out what it feels like to be a gold miner. A gold miner that loves her tongue.

What won't we do for a fun picture?

Chillin'.

Christian had fun trying to get the wheel moving, which he succeeded in doing quickly. There's that hood again! Ugh!

Addison trying out Gold Mining again. She's very inquisitive!

Here we are in the place where they would travel down into the mines. It was kinda creepy and I can't even imagine how scary it would have been 150 years ago, ridin' along roller coaster style!

Here's the seat thingy they would ride on. At some points they were as far as a mile under ground! Crazy, huh?!

This is the "cottage" where the owner of the mine lived. We took a tour and one of the figures that stuck out to me was that they owned the water company that supplied San Francisco and ended up selling it for $40 million! Back in the 1800's! I can't even imagine having a fraction of that! Money, money, money!

I thought this was such a cute picture! It's like Addie's looking back at us cause she's hangin' with the big kids!

After the mine, we went over to downtown Grass Valley. Most of the people that worked in the mines were Cornish immigrants and each day their wives would pack them "Pasties" for lunch. A pastie is like an empanada with meat, onion, potato, really whatever you want in it. Anyways, they would pack them pasties, all wrapped up nice and warm and the men would take them down and eat them in the mine. So we thought it was fitting to try them for lunch on this day.

The shop was super cute and had tons of food from England.


So of course we had to get some dessert! At $7.75 for 6 small cakes, I quickly had buyers remorse over our dessert! Oh well.


After we got our food we had to rush over to Alexis' tennis lesson, so we enjoyed a nice lunch of Pasties on the patio. Yummy!


Whew! There, now I'm all caught up on my blogging! That catches me up just in time to get ready for our 3rd visitor tomorrow! Hooray, Amy's coming to town!